“They want to make a regular prisoner of me,” said Flora, laughing. “Papa is as bad as the old nurse! But he has not been here to-day, so I have had my own way. Did you meet George?”
“No; but Margaret said he had been with her.”
“I wish he would come. We expect the second post to bring the news that Mr. Esdaile has accepted the Chiltern Hundreds. If he found it so, he meant to go and talk to Mr. Bramshaw; for, though he is so dull, we must make him agent.”
“Is there any danger of opposition?”
“None at all, if we are soon enough in the field. Papa’s name will secure us, and there is no one else on the right side to come forward, so that it is an absolute rescue of the seat.”
“It is the very moment when men of principle are most wanted,” said Norman. “The questions of the day are no light matters; and it is an immense point to save Stoneborough from being represented by one of the Tomkins’ set.”
“Exactly so,” said Flora. “I should feel it a crime to say one word to deter George, at a time when every effort must be made to support the right cause. One must make sacrifices when the highest interests are at stake.”
Flora seemed to thrive upon her sacrifice—she had never appeared more brilliant and joyous. Her brother saw, in her, a Roman matron; and the ambition that was inherent in his nature, began to find compensation for being crushed, as far as regarded himself, by soaring for another. He eagerly answered that he fully agreed with her, and that she would never repent urging her husband to take on himself the duties incumbent on all who had the power.
Highly gratified, she asked him to look at a copy of George’s intended address, which was lying on the table. He approved of the tenor, but saw a few phrases susceptible of a better point. “Give it,” she said, putting a pen into his hand; and he began to interline and erase her fair manuscript, talking earnestly, and working up himself and the address at the same time, till it had grown into a composition far superior to the merely sensible affair it had been. Eloquence and thought were now in the language, and substance—and Flora was delighted.
“I have been very disrespectful to my niece all this time,” said Norman, descending from the clouds of patriotism.