As a fact, there was no contest, and if each of the three veteran workers thought himself aggrieved, he had the consolation of knowing that the other two shared his grievance. Wattercouch was discreetly mysterious about Sam in the inner councils of the local Party, used Gatenby’s name freely and managed to convey that Branstone was something much bigger than he appeared to be. He had, at least, got them out of their quandary. Nor did Sam discredit his sponsor either at the private meeting he addressed or at the public one which followed. He had said he was an orator, Wattercouch had repeated it indefatigably, and Sam’s audience believed it implicitly. He was not quite an orator, but was coming along nicely under the tuition of an old actor who had failed on the stage and now called himself a professor of elocution. He became Mr. Councillor Branstone, and happy little references to the event began to appear in the papers. The _Sunday Judge_, for instance, had “no doubt that Mr. Branstone will live to look back upon his unopposed return to the Council as a minor episode of his political career, and we speak by the book. Branstone will go far, but, meantime, it is something even for him to know that he is the most popular man in St. Mary’s Ward. We had almost written in the whole city, but that would be to anticipate. How is it done? How is such popularity achieved? How, in other words, did merit become recognized? Mr. Branstone himself only smiled when we asked him, but his smile is half of his secret and his rousing, earnest oratory the other half. They are indeed an open smile and an open secret. But there are other secrets less open. All we shall say now is, ‘Watch Branstone. He will not disappoint you.’” There was a low evening paper, run in the Conservative interest, which fastened on the phrase “other secrets less open” and published the scurrilous statement that one of the less open secrets was the fact that Mr. Councillor Branstone’s mother was a charwoman, but the paragraph appeared only in the early edition and unaccountably disappeared from later issues. It did no harm, as first editions are not published for politicians, but for sportsmen, and, in any case, there was a brief, but dignified, eulogy of Mr. Branstone in the _Manchester Warden_ next day. That paper happened, fortunately, to be Liberal in politics, and indeed to be, on just occasion, a valiant log-roller. It rolled a log for Sam; the popularity of Branstone was established, hall-marked by the Press; and it was about this time that Stewart’s second potboiler was accepted for inclusion in Branstone’s Novels. The terms were even more favourable to the author than before. CHAPTER XVII--THE VERITY AFFAIR