Morewood was a long while answering; even in the end what he said could not be called an answer. But he annoyed Lady Richard by shaking his finger at her and observing,
"Ah, there you raise a very interesting question."
"Very," agreed the Dean from the window seat.
"I didn't know you were listening," said Lady Richard, wheeling round.
"I always listen about Mr. Quisanté."
"Exactly!" exclaimed Morewood. "I told you so!" But Lady Richard did not even pretend to understand his exultation or what he meant. Whatever he had happened to mean about poor May, the Dean was not Alexander Quisanté's wife.
SEVENTY-SEVEN AND SUSY SINNETT.
The course of events gave to the Henstead election an importance which seemed rather adventitious to people not Henstead-born. It occurred among the earliest; the cry was on its trial. Quisanté was a prominent champion, his opponent commanded great influence, and the seat had always been what Constantine Blair used to call "pivotal," and less diplomatic tongues "wobbly." Such materials for conspicuousness were sure to lose nothing in the hands of Quisanté. The consciousness that he fought a larger than merely local fight, on a platform broader than parochial, under more eyes than gazed at him from the floor of the Corn-Exchange, was the spur he needed to urge him to supreme effort and rouse him to moments of inspiration. Add to this the feeling that his own career was at its crisis. Even Fanny Gaston, who rather unwillingly accompanied her sister to the Bull, was in twenty-four hours caught by the spirit of combat and acknowledged that Quisanté was a fine leader of a battle, however much he left to be desired as a brother-in-law. She flung herself into the fight with unstinted zeal, and was rewarded by Quisanté's conviction that he had at last entirely overcome her dislike of him.
"He's really splendid in his own way," she wrote to Jimmy Benyon—by now they had come to corresponding occasionally—"and I think that you anyhow—I don't ask Dick, who's got a fight of his own—might come and give him some help. People know how much you did for him, and it looks rather odd that you should neither of you be here." So Jimmy, after a struggle, packed up, and gave and received a reciprocal shock of surprise when he got into the same railway carriage as the Dean and Mrs. Baxter.