‘Oh, good of you!  And kind of Mr. Peridon!’ She turned to Louise, who smiled at the simple art of the exclamation, assenting.

Victor below, on the stage platform, indicated the waving of a hand to them, and his delight at Simeon’s ringing points:  which were, to Dartrey’s mind, vacuously clever and crafty.  Dartrey despised effects of oratory, save when soldiers had to be hurled on a mark—­or citizens nerved to stand for their country.

Nesta dived into her father’s brilliancy of appreciation, a trifle pained by Dartrey’s aristocratic air when he surveyed the herd of heads agape and another cheer rang round.  He smiled with her, to be with her, at a hit here and there; he would not pretend an approval of this manner of winning electors to consider the country’s interests and their own.  One fellow in the crowded pit, affecting a familiarity with Simeon, that permitted the taking of liberties with the orator’s Christian name, mildly amused him.  He had no objection to hear ‘Simmy’ shouted, as Louise de Seilles observed.  She was of his mind, in regard to the rough machinery of Freedom.

Skepsey entered the box.

‘We shall soon be serious, Miss Nesta,’ he said, after a look at Matilda Pridden.

There was a prolonged roaring—­on the cheerful side.

’And another word about security that your candidate will keep his promises,’ continued Simeon:  ‘You have his word, my friends!’ And he told the story of the old Governor of Goa, who wanted money and summoned the usurers, and they wanted security; whereupon he laid his Hidalgo hand on a cataract of Kronos-beard across his breast, and pulled forth three white hairs, and presented them:  ’And as honourably to the usurious Jews as to the noble gentleman himself, that security was accepted!’

Emerging from hearty clamours, the illustrative orator fell upon the question of political specifics:—­Mr. Victor Radnor trusted to English good sense too profoundly to be offering them positive cures, as they would hear the enemy say he did.  Yet a bit of a cure may be offered, if we ’re not for pushing it too far, in pursuit of the science of specifics, in the style of the foreign physician, probably Spanish, who had no practice, and wished for leisure to let him prosecute his anatomical and other investigations to discover his grand medical nostrum.  So to get him fees meanwhile he advertised a cure for dyspepsia—­the resource of starving doctors.  And sure enough his patient came, showing the grand fat fellow we may be when we carry more of the deciduously mortal than of the scraggy vital upon our persons.  Any one at a glance would have prescribed water-cresses to him:  water-cresses exclusively to eat for a fortnight.  And that the good physician did.  Away went his patient, returning at the end of the fortnight, lean, and with the appetite of a Toledo blade for succulent slices.  He vowed he was the man.  Our estimable doctor eyed him, tapped at