Alfred Hesketh came, it was felt, rather opportunely into the midst of this.  Plenty of people, the whole of Market Square and East Elgin, a good part, too, probably, of the Town Ward, were unaware of his arrival; but for the little world he penetrated he was clothed with all the interest of the great contingency.  His decorous head in the Emmetts’ pew on Sunday morning stood for a symbol as well as for a stranger.  The nation was on the eve of a great far-reaching transaction with the mother country, and thrilling with the terms of the bargain.  Hesketh was regarded by people in Elgin who knew who he was with the mingled cordiality and distrust that might have met a principal.  They did not perhaps say it, but it was in their minds.  “There’s one of them,” was what they thought when they met him in the street.  At any other time he would have been just an Englishman; now he was invested with the very romance of destiny.  The perception was obscure, but it was there.  Hesketh, on the other hand, found these good people a very well-dressed, well-conditioned, decent lot, rather sallower than he expected, perhaps, who seemed to live in a fair-sized town in a great deal of comfort, and was wholly unconscious of anything special in his relation to them or theirs to him.

He met Lorne just outside the office of Warner, Fulke, and Murchison the following day.  They greeted heartily.  “Now this is good!” said Lorne, and he thought so.  Hesketh confided his first impression.  “It’s not unlike an English country town,” he said, “only the streets are wider, and the people don’t look so much in earnest.”

“Oh, they’re just as much in earnest some of the time,” Lorne laughed, “but maybe not all the time!”

The sun shone crisply round them; there was a brisk October market; on the other side of the road Elmore Crow dangled his long legs over a cart flap and chewed a cheroot.  Elgin was abroad, doing business on its wide margin of opportunity.  Lorne cast a backward glance at conditions he had seen.

“I know what you mean,” he said.  “Sharp of you to spot it so soon, old chap!  You’re staying with the English Church minister, aren’t you—­Mr Emmett?  Some connection of yours, aren’t they?”

“Mrs Emmett is Chafe’s sister—­Mrs Chafe, you know, is my aunt,” Hesketh reminded him.  “I say, Murchison, I left old Chafe wilder than ever.  Wallingham’s committee keep sending him leaflets and things.  They take it for granted he’s on the right side, since his interests are.  The other day they asked him for a subscription!  The old boy sent his reply to the Daily News and carried it about for a week.  I think that gave him real satisfaction; but he hates the things by post.”

Lorne laughed delightedly.  “I expect he’s snowed under with them.  I sent him my own valuable views last week.”

“I’m afraid they’ll only stiffen him.  That got to be his great argument after you left, the fact that you fellows over here want it.  He doesn’t approve of a bargain if the other side sees a profit.  Curiously enough, his foremen and people out in Chiswick are all for it.  I was talking to one of them just before I left—­’Stands to reason, sir,’ he said, ’we don’t want to pay more for a loaf than we do now.  But we’ll do it, sir, if it means downing them Germans; he said.”