However, he did not find it so easy to go to sleep. His pulses were still tingling under the emotions of the day and the stimulus of the hubbub they had just passed through. His mind raced backwards and forwards over the incidents and excitements of the last six months, over the scenes of his canvass--and over some other scenes of a different kind which had taken place in the country-house whither he and Fontenoy were returning. But he did his best to feign sleep. His one desire was that Fontenoy should not talk to him. Fontenoy, however, was not easily taken in, and no sooner did George make his first restless movement under the rug he had drawn over him, than his companion broke silence. "By the way, what did you think of that memorandum of mine on Maxwell's bill?" George fidgeted and mumbled. Fontenoy, undaunted, began to harangue on certain minutiae of factory law with a monotonous zest of voice and gesture which seemed to Tressady nothing short of amazing. He watched the speaker a minute or two through his half-shut eyes. So this was his leader to be--the man who had made him member for Market Malford. Eight years before, when George Tressady had first entered Christchurch, he had found that place of tempered learning alive with traditions on the subject of "Dicky Fontenoy." And such traditions--good Heavens! Subsequently, at most race-meetings, large and small, and at various clubs, theatres, and places of public resort, the younger man had had his opportunities of observing the elder, and had used them always with relish, and sometimes with admiration. He himself had no desire to follow in Fontenoy's footsteps. Other elements ruled in him, which drew him other ways. But there was a magnificence about the impetuosity, or rather the doggedness with which Fontenoy had plunged into the business of ruining himself, which stirred the imagination. On the last occasion, some three and a half years before this Market Malford election, when Tressady had seen Fontenoy before starting himself on a long Eastern tour, he had been conscious of a lively curiosity as to what might have happened to "Dicky" by the time he came back again. The eldest sons of peers do not generally come to the workhouse; but there are aristocratic substitutes which, relatively, are not much less disagreeable; and George hardly saw how they were to be escaped.