But to Isaac White all this was nought. He had seen the house in every aspect; and to-day his mind was filled with other things—with votes and voters, with some anxiety on his own account and more on his patron’s. What would Sir Robert say if aught went wrong at Chippinge? True, the loss of the borough seemed barely possible; it had been held securely for many years. But the times were so stormy, public feeling ran so high, the mob was so rough, that nothing seemed impossible, in view of the stress to which the soundest candidates were exposed. If Mr. Bankes stood to fail in Dorset, if Mr. Duncombe had small chance in Yorkshire, if Sir Edward Knatchbull was a lost man in Kent, if Mr. Hart Davies was no better in Bristol, if no man but an out-and-out Reformer could count on success, who was safe? White’s grandfather, his father, he himself had lived and thriven by the system which he saw tottering to its fall. He belonged to it, he was part of it; did he not mark his allegiance to it by wearing top-boots in the daytime and shorts in full dress? And he was prepared—were it only out of gratitude to the ladder by which he had risen—to stand by it and by his patron to the last. But, strange anomaly, White was at heart a Cobbett man. His sneaking sympathies were, in his own despite, with the class from which he sprang. He saw commons filched from the poor, while the labourers fell on the rates. He saw large taxes wrung from the country to be spent in the town. He saw the severity of the laws, and especially the game laws. He saw absentee rectors and starving curates. He saw the dumb impotence of nine-tenths of the people; and he felt that the system under which these things had grown up was wrong. But wrong or right, he was part of it, he was pledged to it; and all the theories in the world, and all the “Political Registers” which he digested of an evening, would not induce him to betray it. Notwithstanding, he feared that in the matter of the borough he had not been quite so wide-awake as became him; or Pybus, the Bowood man, would not have stolen a march upon him. His misgivings grew as he came in sight of the door, and saw Sir Robert on the flight of steps which led to it. Apparently the baronet had seen him, for as White drove up a servant appeared to lead the mare to the stables. Sir Robert looked her over as she was led away. “The grey looks well, White,” he said. She was of his breeding. “Yes, Sir Robert. Give me a good horse and they may have the new-fangled railroads that like them. But I am afraid, sir——” “One moment!” The servant was out of hearing, and the baronet’s tone, as he caught White up, betrayed agitation. “Who is that looking over the Lower Wicket, White?” he continued. “She has been there a quarter of an hour, and—and I can’t make her out.”