One thing the Quisanté people (as Mrs. Baxter called them) found out before they had been long in Henstead, and this was the important and delicate nature of anything and everything that touched or affected Mr. Japhet Williams. Something of this had been foreshadowed by Mr. Foster's account of his friend, but the reality went far beyond. Japhet was a small fretful-faced man; he was rich, liberal, and kind, but he plumed himself on a scrupulous conscience and was the slave of a trifle-ridden mind. As a member of a party, then, he was hard to work with, harder even than Weston Marchmont, of whom he seemed sometimes to May to be a reduced and travestied copy. Not a speech could be made, not a bill issued, but Japhet Williams flew round to the Committee Room with an objection to urge and a hole to pick. There he would find large, stout, shrewd old Foster, installed in an arm-chair and ready with native diplomacy, or Quisanté himself, earning Mrs. Baxter's nickname of "Mr. Reasons" by the suave volubility of his explanations. May laughed at such scenes half-a-dozen times in the first week of her stay at Henstead.
"Is he so very important to us?" she asked of Foster.
He answered her in a whisper behind a fat hand,
"His house is only a couple of miles from Sir Winterton's, and Lady Mildmay's been civil. He employs a matter of two hundred men up at the mills yonder."
"The position's very critical, isn't it, then?"
"So your good husband seems to think," said Foster, jerking his thumb towards where Quisanté leant over Japhet's shoulder, almost caressing him, and ingeniously justifying the statistics of an electioneering placard. May's eyes followed the direction of the jerk. She sighed.
"Yes, it's a waste of Mr. Quisanté's time, but we can't help that," Foster sighed responsively. It was not, however, of Quisanté's time that his wife had been thinking.
Japhet rose. Quisanté took his hand, shook it, and held it.
"Now you're satisfied, really satisfied, Mr. Williams?" he asked. "I give you my word that what I've said is absolutely accurate."
"What that placard says, sir?"