At eleven o'clock that morning he went to Covent Garden, and again and again at eleven the following mornings he went there. On the tenth morning he called to Jenny, who had grown shy of him and was leaving his breakfast on a tray outside his door, and said:
"Jenny, I wish you to tell your mistress that I shall be leaving this lodging in another week."
Then Jenny's white and wistful face broke down utterly, and with a crack in her voice, and the ghost of a smothered sob in it, she said:
"I knowed as it 'ud come to this. The minit I set eyes on 'er I said as she'd take ye away from me--an' she 'as."
VI
The Governor never knew that Oscar had broken faith with him.
When the time came for the next session of Althing, a Bill for the reform of the Constitution, reenacting the abolition of the Governorship and the appointment of a Minister, was passed by a large majority. But an Act involving a constitutional change had to be voted by two Parliaments and therefore a dissolution of Althing became necessary. The time of dissolution was at the discretion of the Governor, and he might have delayed it until the fever for reform had passed. Instead of doing so he decided to dissolve immediately, thus feeding the agitation and precipitating his own fate.
Many things befall the man whose day is done, and the measure of the Governor's errors was not yet full. When the time came to select the candidates it was found that the constituency for which Oscar had sat--the capital--was once more without its man, and to everybody's astonishment the Governor himself, in order to secure a voice in the popular assembly, determined to stand for it.
This unusual step on the Governor's part created great excitement, but the fever increased tenfold when it was announced that the Factor intended to oppose him.
Never had popular feeling run so high as on the night when the Governor and the Factor had to confront each other on the same hustings. The better people stayed away, being sorry and ashamed that these two friends of fifty years should claw each other face to face like eagles, but the baser sort were reveling in the prospect of that spectacle and the Artisan's Institute was crowded.