Meanwhile the sun of Victor Radnor’s popularity was already up over the extended circle likely to be drenched by a falsification of his daring augury, though the scud flew swift, and the beeches raved, and the oaks roared and snarled, and pine-trees fell their lengths.  Fine tomorrow, to a certainty! he had been heard to say.  The doubt weighed for something; the balance inclined with the gentleman who had become so popular:  for he had done the trick so suddenly, like a stroke of the wizard; and was a real man, not one of your spangled zodiacs selling for sixpence and hopping to a lucky hit, laughed at nine times out of ten.  The reasoning went—­and it somewhat affected the mansion as well as the cottage,—­that if he had become popular in this astonishing fashion, after making one of the biggest fortunes of modern times, he might, he must, have secret gifts.  ‘You can’t foretell weather!’ cried a pothouse sceptic.  But the workmen at Lakelands declared that he had foretold it.  Sceptics among the common folk were quaintly silenced by other tales of him, being a whiff from the delirium attending any mention of his name.

How had he become suddenly so popular as to rouse in the mind of Mr. Caddis, the sitting Member for the division of the county (said to have the seat in his pocket), a particular inquisitiveness to know the bearing of his politics?  Mr. Radnor was rich, true:  but these are days when wealthy men, ambitious of notoriety, do not always prove faithful to their class; some of them are cunning to bid for the suffrages of the irresponsible, recklessly enfranchised, corruptible masses.  Mr. Caddis, if he had the seat in his pocket, had it from the support of a class trusting him to support its interests:  he could count on the landowners, on the clergy, on the retired or retiring or comfortably cushioned merchants resident about Wrensham, on the many obsequious among electoral shopmen; annually he threw open his grounds, and he subscribed, patronized, did what was expected; and he was not popular; he was unpopular.  Why?  But why was the sun of this 23rd August, shining from its rise royally upon pacified, enrolled and liveried armies of cloud, more agreeable to earth’s populations than his pinched appearance of the poor mopped red nose and melancholic rheumy eyelets on a January day!  Undoubtedly Victor Radnor risked his repute of prophet.  Yet his popularity would have survived the continuance of the storm and deluge.  He did this:—­and the mystery puzzling the suspicious was nothing wonderful:  in addition to a transparent benevolence, he spread a sort of assurance about him, that he thought the better of the people for their thinking well of themselves.  It came first from the workmen at his house.  ‘The right sort, and no humbug:  likes you to be men.’  Such a report made tropical soil for any new seed.