this class is the will to believe in the integrity of the beloved and false; of that is the desire to lift a nation to the level of its mountain-ranges”?  Both dispositions have a tendency to overwork the heart; and it is easy to imagine that they might interact.  Lorne Murchison’s wish, which was indeed a burning longing and necessity, to believe in the Dora Milburn of his passion, had been under a strain since the night on which he brought her the pledge which she refused to wear.  He had hardly been conscious of it in the beginning, but by constant suggestion it had grown into his knowledge, and for weeks he had taken poignant account of it.  His election had brought him no nearer a settlement with her objection to letting the world know of their relations.  The immediate announcement that it was to be disputed gave Dora another chance, and once again postponed the assurance that he longed for with a fever which was his own condemnation of her, if he could have read that sign.  For months he had seen so little of her, had so altered his constant habit of going to the Milburns’, that his family talked of it, wondering among themselves; and Stella indulged in hopeful speculations.  They did not wonder or speculate. at the Milburns’.  It was an axiom there that it is well to do nothing rashly.

Lorne, in the office on Market Street, had been replying to Mr Fulke to the effect that the convention could hardly be much longer postponed, but that as yet he had no word of the date of it when the telephone bell rang and Mr Farquharson’s voice at the other end asked him to come over to the committee room.  “They’ve decided about it now, I imagine,” he told his senior, putting on his hat; and something of the wonted fighting elation came upon him as he went down the stairs.  He was right in his supposition.  They had decided about it, and they were waiting, in a group that made every effort to look casual, to tell him when he arrived.

They had delegated what Horace Williams called “the job” to Mr Farquharson, and he was actually struggling with the preliminaries of it, when Bingham, uncomfortable under the curious quietude of the young fellow’s attention, burst out with the whole thing.

“The fact is, Murchison, you can’t poll the vote.  There’s no man in the Riding we’d be better pleased to send to the House; but we’ve got to win this election, and we can’t win it with you.”

“You think you can’t?” said Lorne.

“You see, old man,” Horace Williams put in, “you didn’t get rid of that save-the-Empire-or-die scheme of yours soon enough.  People got to think you meant something by it.”

“I shall never get rid of it,” Lorne returned simply, and the others looked at one another.

“The popular idea seems to be,” said Mr Farquharson judicially, “that you would not hesitate to put Canada to some material loss, or at least to postpone her development in various important directions, for the sake of the imperial connection.”