“I doubt you’ll be too much for me, Miss Harriet!” he remarked, with his thin smile. “You’re so popular, and those friends of yours have been working terribly hard. _I’ve_ no cars to fetch folks along to vote for me, so I must just depend on a little kindly feeling and any service I may have done the district in all these years. That may carry me a bit of the way, but I fear it won’t go far against motors and ribbons!” “Thorne’s funking you--that’s a sure thing!” Hamer observed outside. “He’s thinking he’s out of the game from the start. Lancaster’s certain to go through--everybody says that--so the Creeping Jesus has a very thin chance, I’m afraid. Now, Kavanagh, off you get to Stone Riggs for those almshouse folk--four of ’em, mind now! Dandy Anne, the Sunflatts district’s yours; you know how we mapped it out. I’ll run over to Halfrebeck for that old chap I couldn’t get a promise from. It might help a bit, Harriet, if you came along, too. It’s only about a mile.” Wiggie, who was wearing her colours in his buttonhole, gave her his seat behind the driver, and hopped in behind; and, as they slid over the hill, found himself observing the candidate from a fresh mental standpoint. There was something new about Harriet, to-day, that wasn’t to be accounted for by the dark-gray tailor-made and trim _suède_ hat. The impression of strength, almost of rough power, already familiar, was now fused with a more courteous dignity and a nervous self-possession very different from her usual sledge-hammer assurance. Memory had leaped upon her from under a snapped lock, showing her similar crises in her grandfather’s career. Just so had he said this, done the other, looked and thought--one of the fine men a county never quite forgets. It was pretty fair cheek, perhaps, to think she was fit to follow him. It would be a rotten turn-out if she made a mess of it. For all our vaunted superiority, what trembling children we are, in the first moment of feeling for our fathers’ shoes! Lanty had arrived by the time they came back, with the wobbler triumphantly installed in the tonneau, and shortly afterwards Bluecaster motored down. Voters were coming in quickly, now, and a cheerful crowd was collecting round the booth, Helwise’s voice being easily distinguishable above the rest, as she informed his lordship that he must certainly call and see the perfectly sweet “porcelain on legs,” and there was also just one other little matter of a washhouse boiler. She had worked him up to offering her an entire kitchen range when the Watters limousine groaned round the corner, with four inside, a few more in front, and Grumphy fatly ensconced within the luggage-rail; and under cover of its entry he escaped.