"Oh, Mr. Fitzgerald!" said Mr. Clutterbuck in some alarm, "we can't do without an allusion to the Offences Bill! Really, Mr. Fitzgerald, you know it's the most important reform, well, of our time so to speak. Why," said he, remembering sundry quotations from his reading: "this country is the pioneer; Italy's only talked of the thing; Germany's backward. There's only Nebraska abreast of us. And think of the effect!" "Look here," said Charlie Fitzgerald a little impatiently, "_that_ paragraph has got to go. If you want to say anything about the Offences Disfranchisement Bill you had better put in four lines saying that wild horses won't make you vote for it in any shape or form. But I doubt whether those old jossers in Mickleton would pass that. Just say nothing about it, and a day or two before the poll enlarge your spirit on the platform and damn it up hill and down dale." Mr. Clutterbuck felt like a man who had just lost his dog, but he held his tongue, and only thought mournfully of the letters that might come to him next day. "And now," said Charlie Fitzgerald as he drew a red chalk thoughtfully through the offending paragraph, "I'm going off this evening, and when I come back I shall tell you what I _think_ ought to be added at the end of the manifesto--I shall know then." He got up quite suddenly. "I won't be late," he added. "I'll be back before midnight, and I'll tell you." Mr. Clutterbuck and he looked at each other without speaking for a moment, and for once there was a slight disturbance in the merchant's mind as he looked through the window and saw his secretary calmly giving orders to the gardener and to the mechanician, and a moment later stepping into the newly-bought F.I.A.T. with a gesture of proprietorship that was perhaps a trifle exaggerated. But this unworthy mood disturbed for but a moment the Clutterbuckian poise, and certainly his young friend's achievement, when he returned to tell of it, would have dispelled for ever any such ill-omened emotion. * * * * * The business which Mr. Fitzgerald had before him that evening was one so familiar to all those acquainted with the apparatus of self-government, that it is perhaps redundant in me to chronicle it. Nevertheless it was of such importance in the events that follow, that I must briefly relate it. He drove to the station and sent the car back (its reappearance was a first solace to the master of the house); he took, out of the petty cash, a first return for Victoria, hailed a cab as he left the station (noting the expense with a regularity rare in a man of high birth and Irish nationality), drove to his Club, dined handsomely, again put down this incidental item in round figures, hailed yet another cab, and told the driver vaguely to drive to Mickleton.