"I can do it by five, I should think."
"That will be soon enough. The doctor said that if—you were wanted, it would be about then. Good-bye, old gentleman!"
"Good-bye, Dolly! Mind you go to bed." (We seem to have spent a large portion of that twenty-four hours urging each other to go to bed.)
Then I went back to work.
Polling had been brisk during the dinner-hour, and both Cash and Robin considered that we were doing fairly well. Things would be slack at Stoneleigh itself during the afternoon, and the obvious and politic course now was to drive over to the fishing village of Hunnable—I had only time for one, and this was the most considerable—and catch my marine constituents as they emerged from the ocean, Proteus-like, between three and four o'clock.
I did so, and for the space of an hour and a half I solicited the patronage of innumerable tarry mariners, until their horny hands had filled up the voting-papers and my own smelt to heaven of fish. It was a quarter to five, and dark, before I escaped from the attentions of a small but pertinacious group of inquirers who wanted to understand my exact attitude on the question of trawling within the three-mile limit, and proceeded at a hand-gallop back to Stoneleigh. (That odoriferous but popular vehicle, the motor-car, was still in the preceded-by-a-man-ten-yards-in-front-bearing-a-red-flag stage in those days, and we had to rely on that antiquated but much more reliable medium of transport, the horse.) The snow lay very heavily in places, and our progress was not over-rapid. Moreover, passing the central Committee Rooms on my way to the hotel, I was stopped and haled within to conciliate various wobblers, and another twenty minutes of precious time sped. But I stuck to my determination to let nothing interfere with duty that day, and I argued with free-thinkers and pump-handled bemused supporters until all was settled and Cash said I might go.
Still, it was nearer six than five when my panting horses drew up at the Cathedral Arms.
There was no Dolly to receive me this time, but at the top of the stairs leading to our rooms I met the doctor. He was accompanied by a grey-haired, kind-eyed old gentleman in a frock-coat, with "London Specialist" written all over him. It was Sir James Fordyce.
"Well?" I asked feverishly as I shook hands.
The two men motioned me into the sitting-room, and Farquharson said, in a curiously uncertain fashion—