When I had first advised him to go in for politics I did not imagine the matter would have been so easily arranged. Another and a cleverer man, equally rich, might have waited for years for such an opportunity. The seat he was selected to contest happened, however, to be in that part of the country in which lay Sir Anthony Cross’s estate, and what with Sir Anthony’s own influence and the influence of the people around with whom he was connected by ties of marriage or of interest, he was practically able to secure Lionel’s election. If the latter had the least notion of Sir Anthony’s real motive for all this attention he was evidently prepared to accept it, and laugh in his sleeve at the fool who was carrying his pigs to such a bad market. The son of the man who had risen to wealth from the position of a street boy had plenty of shrewd cunning, and could bide his time. Men of high and noble honour and unstainable integrity do not make fortunes, or at least very rarely, and the valuable qualities of those who do are not as a rule lost in a generation. Chapter XVII My affairs stood thus. I proposed to marry Miss Gascoyne if I could, but I had no notion of breaking with Sibella. All this time I was closely debating which of the obstacles in my way I should remove next. There had been three Henry Gascoynes. The youngest was gone. There remained two, and one of them, nearly ninety, was scarcely worth considering. He was hardly likely to marry, and if he did so children were almost out of the question, although I had not made myself acquainted with his physical condition and method of life. He lived the existence of a recluse on a miniature estate somewhere in the lake district. None of the Gascoynes that I was acquainted with had ever met him. The remaining Henry Gascoyne was a parson and a childless widower. He was sixty-two years of age. His cure was in Lincolnshire, and one of the very few livings still worth having. The eminently spiritual method of selection practised by the Established Church was testified to by the fact that the living had been the gift of his wife’s father, and the claims of a curate who had done the work of the parish for thirty years, representing the valetudinarian and octogenarian vicar, had been passed over. Country livings are an appanage of family, not of church. Even that good old-fashioned custom, however, is going with the diminution in the value of tithes. It is no use struggling to retain what is not worth having. Henry Gascoyne must be my next victim if I were not to play the coward and draw back, wasting so much good work already done. The very “if” that entered into my mind warned me that my nerve could not endure for ever. I had thought the preservation of nerve merely a question of self-control, but as I grew older I realised that there were many and complex human emotional developments in perpetual siege of that valuable attribute.