He stopped, silenced and taken aback. For some were on their feet, others were rising; the faces of nine out of ten were turned from him. What was it? He turned to see; and he saw. A few paces within the door stood Sir Robert himself; his fur collared travelling cloak hanging loose about him and showing his tall spare figure at its best. He stooped, but his high-bred face, cynically smiling, was turned full on the speaker; it was certain that he had heard much, if not all. And Vaughan had been brave indeed, he had been a hero, if taken by surprise and at this disadvantage he had not shown some discomfiture. It is easy to smile now! Easy to say that this was but an English gentleman, bound like others by the law! And Vaughan’s own kinsman! But few would have smiled then. He, through whose hands passed a quarter of the patronage of a county, who dammed or turned the stream of promotion, who had made many there and could unmake them, whose mere hint could have consigned, a few years back, the troublesome to the press-gang, who belonged almost as definitely, almost as exclusively, to a caste, as do white men in the India of to-day; who seldom showed himself to the vulgar save in his coach and four, or riding with belted grooms behind him—about such an one in ’31 there was, if no divinity, at least the ægis of real power, that habit which unquestioned authority confers, that port of Jove to which men bow! Scan the pictured faces of the men who steered this country through the long war—the faces of Liverpool and Castlereagh— _Daring pilots in extremity_, _Scorning the danger when the waves ran high_; or of those men, heirs to their traditions, who, for nearly twenty years, confronted the no less formidable forces of discontent and disaffection—of Peel and Wellington, Croker and Canning, and he is blind who does not find there the reflection of that firm rule, the shadow of that power which still survived, though maimed and weakened in the early thirties. Certainly it was not easy to smile at such men then; at their pride or their prejudices, their selfishness or their eccentricity. For behind lay solid power. Small blame to Vaughan therefore, if in the face of the servile attitude, the obsequious rising of the company about him, he felt his countenance change, if he could not quite hide his dismay. And though he told himself that his feelings were out of place, that the man did but stand in the shoes which would one day be his, and was but now what he would be, _vox faucibus hæsit_—he was dumb. It was Sir Robert who broke the silence. “I fear, Mr. Vaughan,” he said, the gleam in his eyes alone betraying his passion—for he would as soon have walked the country lanes in his dressing robe as given way to rage in that company—“I fear you are saying in haste words which you will repent at leisure! Did I hear aright that—that you are in favour of the Bill?” “I am,” Vaughan replied a little huskily. “I——”