As Horace Williams said, if a dead horse could be made to go this one would have brought Murchison romping in.  And Lorne had taken heed to the counsel of his party leaders.  At joint meetings, which offered the enemy his. best opportunity for travesty and derision, he had left it in the background of debate, devoting himself to arguments of more immediate utility.  In the literature of the campaign it glowed with prospective benefit, but vaguely, like a halo of Liberal conception and possible achievement, waiting for the word from overseas.  The Express still approved it, but not in headlines, and wished the fact to be widely understood that while the imperial idea was a very big idea, the Liberals of South Fox were going to win this election without any assistance from it.

Lorne submitted.  After all, victory was the thing.  There could be no conquest for the idea without the party triumph first.  He submitted, but his heart rebelled.  He looked over the subdivisional reports with Williams and Farquharson, and gave ear to their warning interpretations; but his heart was an optimist, and turned always to the splendid projection upon the future that was so incomparably the title to success of those who would unite to further it.  His mind accepted the old working formulas for dealing with an average electorate, but to his eager apprehending heart it seemed unbelievable that the great imperial possibility, the dramatic chance for the race that hung even now, in the history of the world, between the rising and the setting of the sun, should fail to be perceived and acknowledged as the paramount issue, the contingency which made the by-election of South Fox an extraordinary and momentous affair.  He believed in the Idea; he saw it, with Wallingham, not only a glorious prospect, but an educative force; and never had he a moment of such despondency that it confounded him upon his horizon in the faded colours of some old Elizabethan mirage.

The opera house, the night of Mr Murchison’s final address to the electors of South Fox, was packed from floor to ceiling, and a large and patient overflow made the best of the hearing accommodation of the corridors and the foyer.  A Minister was to speak, Sir Matthew Tellier, who held the portfolio of Public Works; and for drawing a crowd in Elgin there was nothing to compare with a member of the Government.  He was the sum of all ambition and the centre of all importance; he was held to have achieved in the loftiest sense, and probably because he deserved to; a kind of afflatus sat upon him.  They paid him real deference and they flocked to hear him.  Cruickshank was a second attraction; and Lorne himself, even at this stage of the proceedings, “drew” without abatement.  They knew young Murchison well enough; he had gone in and out among them all his life; yet since he had come before them in this new capacity a curious interest had gathered about him.  People looked at him as if he had developed something they did not understand, and perhaps he had; he was in touch with the Idea.  They listened with an intense personal interest in him which, no doubt, went to obscure what he said:  perhaps a less absorbing personality would have carried the Idea further.  However, they did look and listen—­that was the main point, and on their last opportunity they were in the opera house in great numbers.