"Why, you know we've been expecting it every day." He despised himself for using this subterfuge, but he could think of nothing better to say. "What is to be our chief card, Bryant?"
"The drink question, licensing reform, and all that kind of rot."
"Then let's drink to the success of the destruction of the drink curse, Bryant," he said. "It's all of a piece."
The other looked at him curiously. This was not like the Leicester he had known lately.
"I say, Leicester, has that girl jilted you?" he said.
The words stung him more than anything he had heard during the day.
"Yes," he said angrily, "and your wife would have jilted you, if I had proposed to her on the morning of your wedding-day."
With that he got up and walked away. He could not stay among these men any longer. He would go down to the National, and find out more particulars about the dissolution. It would help him to forget. When he returned, two hours later, he found a telegram awaiting him. It was from the chairman of his political association. "Urgent that you come down immediately," he read; "to-morrow, if possible. Wire if I may arrange for a big meeting in Taviton to-morrow night. Have forestalled others and taken hall provisionally. Don't fail. Deeply sorry to hear about Miss Castlemaine."
Scarcely knowing what he was doing, he seized a telegraph form, and said that he would be at Taviton the next day.
"There," he said, as he sent it off, "drink and politics will help me to forget," but he did not dream of what would happen before the morrow came to an end.