Lorne faced them with an enviable security; the friendliness of the meeting was in the air.  The gathering was almost entirely of one political complexion:  the Conservatives of the town would have been glad enough to turn out to hear Minister Tellier; but the Liberals were of no mind to gratify them at the cost of having to stand themselves, and were on hand early to assert a prior moral claim to chairs.  In the seated throng Lorne could pick out the fine head of his father, and his mother’s face, bright with anticipation, beside.  Advena was there, too, and Stella; and the boys would have a perch, not too conspicuous, somewhere in the gallery.  Dr Drummond was in the second row, and a couple of strange ladies with him:  he was chuckling with uncommon humour at some remark of the younger one when Lorne noted him.  Old Sandy MacQuhot was in a good place; had been since six o’clock, and Peter Macfarlane, too, for that matter, though Peter sat away back as beseemed a modest functionary whose business was with the book and the bell.  Altogether, as Horace Williams leaned over to tell him, it was like a Knox Church sociable—­he could feel completely at home; and though the audience was by no means confined to Knox Church, Lorne did feel at home.  Dora Milburn’s countenance he might perhaps have missed, but Dora was absent by arrangement.  Mr Milburn, as the fight went on, had shown himself so increasingly bitter, to the point of writing letters in the Mercury attacking Wallingham and the Liberal leaders of South Fox, that his daughter felt an insurmountable delicacy in attending even Lorne’s “big meeting.”  Alfred Hesketh meant to have gone, but it was ten by the Milburns’ drawing-room clock before he remembered.  Miss Filkin actually did go, and brought home a great report of it.  Miss Filkin would no more have missed a Minister than she would a bishop; but she was the only one.

Lorne had prepared for this occasion for a long time.  It was certain to come, the day of the supreme effort, when he should make his final appeal under the most favourable circumstances that could be devised, when the harassing work of the campaign would be behind him, and nothing would remain but the luxury of one last strenuous call to arms.  The glory of that anticipation had been with him from the beginning; and in the beginning he saw his great moment only in one character.  For weeks, while he plodded through the details of the benefits South Fox had received and might expect to receive at the hands of the Liberal party, he privately stored argument on argument, piled phrase on phrase, still further to advance and defend the imperial unity of his vision on this certain and special opportunity.  His jihad it would be, for the faith and purpose of his race; so he scanned it and heard it, with conviction hot in him, and impulse strong, and intention noble.  Then uneasiness had arisen, as we know; and under steady pressure he had daily drawn himself from these