"Don't--don't--Mr. Delamere"--said she, faintly, striving to disengage one of her hands, which she instantly placed before her eyes to conceal her rising emotion. Her brother and Mrs. Aubrey considerately came to her relief, by engaging Delamere in conversation. He saw their object; and releasing Miss Aubrey, for the present, from his attentions, soon had entered into a long and very animated account of all his Yatton doings. In spite of herself, as it were, Kate drew near the table, and, engrossed with interest, listened, and joined in the conversation, as if it had not been actually DELAMERE who was sitting beside her. He made very light of the little accident of the wounded lip--but as he went on, Kate looked another way, her eyes obstructed with tears, and her very heart yearning towards him. "Oh, Mr. Delamere!"--she suddenly and vehemently exclaimed--"what _wretches_ they were to use you so!" and then blushed scarlet. "Well--see if I'm not M.P. for Yatton, yet"--said Delamere, with a confident air, just before he rose to go--"and that within a few weeks, too, and _then_"---- "Don't be too sure of _that_," said Aubrey, gravely. "Sure? I've no more doubt of it," replied Delamere, briskly, "than I have of our now being in Vivian Street--if there be the slightest pretence to fairness in a committee of the House of Commons. Why, upon my honor, we've got no fewer than eleven distinct, unequivocal, well-supported"---- "If election committees are to be framed of such people as appear to have been returned"----.... Did, however, the gaudy flower of Titmouse's victory at Yatton contain the seeds of inevitable defeat at St. Stephen's? 'T was surely a grave question; and had to be decided by a tribunal, the constitution of which, however, the legislature hath since, in its wisdom, seen fit altogether to alter. With matters, therefore, as they then were--but now are not--I deal freely, as with history.