The necessity for Mr Abbott was clamorous. It was not only as a principal authority with men as ordinary as himself (and such men are often possessed of great influence or wealth; sometimes of a voice in Parliament); it was not only as a loud name, which the public had long connected with the M’Korio Delta, nor only as the owner of the Abbott Line, that Mr Abbott’s support was demanded in Broad Street. There were a number of other considerations, each apparently of little importance, but forming in the aggregate a strand which men like Mr Barnett are the last to neglect. Bowley depended more perhaps upon Abbott’s general judgment of affairs than upon any other’s man’s: and Bowley controlled the two groups of insurance which the M’Korio coast still had to reckon with. A friendship, a trifle fantastic, was to be discovered between Abbott and the Permanent Under-secretary for Malarial Districts. That in itself might have been of little importance a month earlier; but, with Lord Malham at the Malarial Office, it made a difference; he had only been there three weeks (since the Postage Stamp scandal), he was shy and new to office and the Permanent Under-secretary was still the master of the show. Mr Abbott’s own paper, _The Keelson_, was not perhaps of very great influence in the City; but it was the oldest in the shipping-trade, and, though it certainly lost money, and could obtain but very few advertisements, it was read in every principal office in the provinces, and could only be boycotted at a very considerable expense in the London Press. Oddly enough, it had acquired an established reputation (for its opinions at least) in America and the Colonies, though its total circulation amounted to little more than two thousand copies. To you and me, and Cosmo, and Mr Barnett, and anyone who sees the world from the inside, the thing was a rag, the losing fad of a man more faddist than anyone in our faddist time. But when you are dealing with an investing public of millions, such fads must be reckoned with: for they tell—men cannot all print but they can all talk, and the wild rags tell. Abbott at lunch, two months before, had sworn “by this and by that” to go into the House of Commons. I will not repeat the coarseness of his phrase. The man was so happy-go-lucky, that his determination might mean nothing at all; but Mr Barnett knew, as well as anyone, that if Abbott should so choose there were perhaps five constituencies in which room would at once be made for him. Lastly there was the fact of Abbott’s resistance. Such resistance of itself demanded caution. Therefore it was that, one morning, without so much as a note to announce him, Cosmo walked straight into that little office, where his father had suffered the chief pang of his life two months before. * * * * *