"Oh! you must come," said Cornbury. "My wife particularly desires it." "She is very kind," said he. "But if you ask all your supporters over to the Grange you'll get rather a mixed lot." "I suppose I should; but I don't mean to do that. I shall be very glad, however, to see you;--very glad." "And I shall be very happy to come," said Rowan, having again hesitated as he gave his answer. "I wish I hadn't promised that I'd go there," he said to himself afterwards. This was on the Sunday, after evening church,--an hour or more after the people had all gone home, and he was sitting on that stile, looking to the west, and thinking, as he looked, of that sunset which he and another had seen as they stood there together. He did wish that he had not undertaken to go to Mr. Cornbury's house. What to him would be the society of such people as he should find there,--to him who had laid out for himself a career that would necessarily place his life among other associates? "I'll send and excuse myself," he said. "I'll be called away to Exeter. I have things to do there. I shall only get into a mess by knowing people who will drop me when this ferment of the election is over." And yet the idea of an intimacy at such a house as Cornbury Grange,--with such people as Mrs. Butler Cornbury, was very sweet to him; only this, that if he associated with them or such as them it must be on equal terms. He could acknowledge them to be people apart from him, as ice creams and sponge cakes are things apart from the shillingless schoolboy. But as the schoolboy, if brought within the range of cakes and creams, must devour them with unchecked relish, as though his pocket were lined with coin; so must he, Rowan, carry himself with these curled darlings of society if he found himself placed among them. He liked cakes and creams, but had made up his mind that other viands were as wholesome and more comfortably within his reach. Was it worth his while to go to this banquet which would unsettle his taste, and at which perhaps if he sat there at his ease, he might not be wholly welcome? All his thoughts were not noble. He had declared to himself that a certain thing could not be his except at a cost which he would not pay, and yet he hankered for that thing. He had declared to himself that no social position in which he might ever find himself should make a change in him, on his inner self or on his outward manner; and now he feared to go among these people, lest he should find himself an inferior among superiors. It was not all noble; but there was beneath it a basis of nobility. "I will go," he said at last, fearing that if he did not, there would have been some grain of cowardice in the motives of his action. "If they don't like me it's their fault for asking me."