The young man had changed in none of the aspects he presented to his fellow-citizens since the beginning of the campaign.  In the public eye he wore the same virtues as he wore the same clothes; he summed up even a greater measure of success; his popularity was unimpaired.  He went as keenly about the business of life, handling its details with the same capable old drawl.  Only his mother, with the divination of mothers, declared that since the night of the opera house meeting Lorne had been “all worked up.”  She watched him with furtive anxious looks, was solicitous about his food, expressed relief when she knew him to be safely in bed and asleep.  He himself observed himself with discontent, unable to fathom his extraordinary lapse from self-control on the night of his final address.  He charged it to the strain of unavoidable office work on top of the business of the campaign, abused his nerves, talked of a few days’ rest when they had settled Winter.  He could think of nothing but the points he had forgotten when he had his great chance.  “The flag should have come in at the end,” he would say to himself, trying vainly to remember where it did come in.  He was ill pleased with the issue of that occasion; and it was small compensation to be told by Stella that his speech gave her shivers up and down her back.

Meanwhile the theory of Empire coursed in his blood, fed by the revelation of the future of his country in every newspaper, by the calculated prophecies of American onlookers, and by the telegrams which repeated the trumpet notes of Wallingham’s war upon the mandarinate of Great Britain.  It occupied him so that he began to measure and limit what he had to say about it, and to probe the casual eye for sympathy before he would give an inch of rope to his enthusiasm.  He found it as hard as ever to understand that the public interest should be otherwise preoccupied, as it plainly was, that the party organ, terrified of Quebec, should shuffle away from the subject with perfunctory and noncommittal reference, that among the men he met in the street, nobody’s blood seemed stirred, whatever the day’s news was from England.  He subscribed to the Toronto Post, the leading organ of the Tories, because of its fuller reports and more sympathetic treatment of the Idea, due to the fact that the Idea originated in a brain temporarily affiliated to the Conservative party.  If the departure to imperial preference had any damage in it for Canadian interests, it would be for those which the Post made its special care; but the spirit of party draws the breath of expediency, and the Post flaunting the Union Jack every other day, put secondary manufactures aside for future discussion, and tickled the wheat-growers with the two-shilling advantage they were coming into at the hands of the English Conservatives, until Liberal leaders began to be a little anxious about a possible loss of wheat-growing votes.  It was, as John Murchison said, a queer position for everybody concerned; queer enough, no doubt, to admit a Tory journal into the house on sufferance and as a special matter; but he had a disapproving look for it as it lay on the hall floor, and seldom was the first to open it.