the new countries with interest, an interest evoked by their sudden dramatic leap into the forefront of public concern.  He looked at them with what nature intended to be the eye of a practical businessman.  He looked at Lorne Murchison, too, and listened to him, with steady critical attention.  Lorne seemed in a way to sum it all up in his person, all the better opportunity a man had out there; and he handled large matters of the future with a confidence and a grip that quickened the circulation.  Hesketh’s open mind gradually became filled with the imperial view as he had the capacity to take it; and we need not be surprised if Lorne Murchison, gazing in the same direction, supposed that they saw the same thing.

Hesketh confessed, declared, that Murchison had brought him round; and Lorne surveyed this achievement with a thrill of the happiest triumph.  Hesketh stood, to him, a product of that best which he was so occupied in admiring and pursuing.  Perhaps he more properly represented the second best; but we must allow something for the confusion of early impressions.  Hesketh had lived always in the presence of ideals disengaged in England as nowhere else in the world; in Oxford, Lorne knew, they clustered thick.  There is no doubt that his manners were good, and his ideas unimpeachable in the letter; the young Canadian read the rest into him and loved him for what he might have been.

“As an Englishman,” said Hesketh one evening as they walked together back from the Chafes’ along Knightsbridge, talking of the policy urged by the Colonial representatives at the last Conference, “I could wish the idea were more our own—­that we were pressing it on the colonies instead of the colonies pressing it on us.”

“Doesn’t there come a time in the history of most families,” Lorne replied, “when the old folks look to the sons and daughters to keep them in touch with the times?  Why shouldn’t a vigorous policy of Empire be conceived by its younger nations—­who have the ultimate resources to carry it out?  We’ve got them and we know it—­the iron and the coal and the gold, and the wheat-bearing areas.  I dare say it makes us seem cheeky, but I tell you the last argument lies in the soil and what you can get out of it.  What has this country got in comparison?  A market of forty million people, whom she can’t feed and is less and less able to find work for.  Do you call that a resource?  I call it an impediment—­a penalty.  It’s something to exploit, for the immediate profit in it, something to bargain with; but even as a market it can’t preponderate always, and I can’t see why it should make such tremendous claims.”

“England isn’t superannuated yet, Murchison.”

“Not yet.  Please God she never will be.  But she isn’t as young as she was, and it does seem to me—­”

“What seems to you?”