She was hardly awake, but her expression struck him as very wild and piteous. He went to her and took her in his arms.
"Sleeping quietly, darling—so must you!"
She sank back on her pillows, his arm still round her.
"I was there an hour ago," she murmured. "I shall soon wake up—"
But for the moment she was asleep again, her fair head lying against his shoulder. He sat down beside her, supporting her. Suddenly, as he looked down upon her with mingled passion, tenderness, and pain, a sharp perception assailed him. How thin she was—a mere feather's weight! The face was smaller than ever—the hands skin and bone! Margaret French had once or twice bade him notice this, had spoken with anxiety. He bent over his wife and observed her attentively. It was merely the effect of a hot summer, surely, and of a constant nervous fatigue? He would take her abroad for a fortnight in September, if his official work would let him, and perhaps leave her in north Italy, or Switzerland, with Margaret French.
The great day was half-way through, and the throng in Haggart Park and grounds was at its height. A flower-show in the morning; then a tenants' dinner with a speech from Ashe; and now, in a marquee erected for the occasion, Lord Parham was addressing his supporters in the county. Around him on the platform sat the Whig gentry, the Radical manufacturers, the town wire-pullers and local agents on whom a great party depended; in front of him stretched a crowded meeting drawn in almost equal parts from the coal-mining districts to the north of Haggart and from the agricultural districts to the south....
The August air was stifling; perspiration shone on the broad brows and cheeks of the farmers sitting in the front half of the audience; Lord Parham's gray face was almost white; his harsh voice labored against the acoustic difficulties of the tent; effort and heat, discomfort and ennui breathed from the packed benches, and from the short-necked, large-headed figure of the Premier.
Ashe sat to the speaker's right, outwardly attentive, inwardly ashamed of his party and his chief. He himself belonged to a new generation, for whom formulæ that had satisfied their fathers were empty and dead. But with these formulas Lord Parham was stuffed. A man of average intriguing ability, he had been raised, at a moment of transition, to the place he held, by a consummate command of all the meaner arts of compromise and management, no less than by an invaluable power of playing to the gallery. He led a party who despised him—and he complacently imagined that he was the party. His speech on this occasion bristled with himself, and had, in truth, no other substance; the I's swarmed out upon the audience like wasps.
Ashe groaned in spirit, "We have the ideas," he thought, "but they are damned little good to us—it is the Tories who have the men! Ye gods! must we all talk like this at last?"...