Nevertheless Lorne found more satisfaction in talking imperialism with his father than with anyone else.  While the practical half of John Murchison was characteristically alive to the difficulties involved, the sentimental half of him was ready at any time to give out cautious sparks of sympathy with the splendour of Wallingham’s scheme; and he liked the feeling that a son of his should hark back in his allegiance to the old land.  There was a kind of chivalry in the placing of certain forms of beauty—­ political honour and public devotion, which blossomed best, it seemed, over there—­above the material ease and margin of the new country, and even above the grand chance it offered for a man to make his mark.  Mr Murchison was susceptible to this in anyone, and responsive to it in his son.

As to the local party leaders, they had little more than a shrug for the subject.  So far as they were concerned, there was no Empire and no Idea; Wallingham might as well not have been born.  It seemed to Lorne that they maintained toward him personally a special reticence about it.  Reticence indeed characterized their behaviour generally during the period between the abandonment of the suits and the arrangement of the second Liberal convention.  They had little advice for him about his political attitude, little advice about anything.  He noticed that his presence on one or two occasions seemed to embarrass them, and that his arrival would sometimes have a disintegrating effect upon a group in the post-office or at a street corner.  He added it, without thinking, to his general heaviness; they held it a good deal against him, he supposed, to have reduced their proud standing majority to a beggarly two figures; he didn’t blame them.

I cannot think that the sum of these depressions alone would have been enough to overshadow so buoyant a soul as Lorne Murchison’s.  The characteristics of him I have tried to convey were grafted on an excellent fund of common sense.  He was well aware of the proportions of things; he had no despair of the Idea, nor would he despair should the Idea etherealize and fly away.  Neither had he, for his personal honour, any morbid desires toward White Clam Shell or Finnigan’s cat.  His luck had been a good deal better than it might have been; he recognized that as fully as any sensible young man could, and as for the Great Chance, and the queer grip it had on him, he would have argued that too if anyone had approached him curiously about it.  There I think we might doubt his conclusions.  There is nothing subtler, more elusive to trace than the intercurrents of the emotions.  Politics and love are thought of at opposite poles, and Wallingham perhaps would have laughed to know that he owed an exalted allegiance in part to a half-broken heart.  Yet the impulse that is beyond our calculation, the thing we know potential in the blood but not to be summoned or conditioned, lies always in the shadow of the ideal; and who can analyse that, and say, “Of