"Electors are a lot too easy going in my opinion," said Nelly. "I'm old enough to have seen their foolish ways in my time, and find, over and over again, that they are mostly gulls to be took with words. They never ask what a man's record is and turn over the pages of his past. They never trouble about what he's done, or how he's made his money, or where he stands in public report. It isn't what he has done, but what he's going to do. Yet you can better judge of a man from his past than his promises, and measure, in the light of his record, whether he's going to the House of Commons for patriotic, decent reasons, or for mean ones. And never you vote for a lawyer, Nicholas Roberts. 'Tis a golden rule with Job that never, under any manner of circumstances, will he help to get a lawyer into Parliament. They stand in the way of all progress but their own; they suck our blood in every affair of life; they baffle all honest thinking with their cunning, and look at right and wrong only from the point of expediency. Job says there ought to be a law against lawyers going in at all. But catch them making it! In fact, we're in their clutches more than the fly in the web, because they make the laws; and they'll never make any laws to limit their own powers over us, though always quick enough to increase them. Job says that the only bright side to a revolution would be that the law and the lawyers would be swept into the street orderly bin together. Then we'd start clean and free, and try to keep clean and free." Upon this subject Mrs. Legg always found plenty to say. Indeed she continued to open her mind till they grew weary. "We must be moving if we're going to church," said Sarah. "I think we'd better go and pick up a bit of charity to our neighbour--Sunday and all." CHAPTER XVI THE OFFER OF MARRIAGE Raymond met Estelle on his way from the works and together they walked home. Here and there in the cottage doorways sat women braiding. Among them was Sally Groves--now grown too old and slow to tend the 'Card'--and accident willed that she should make an opening for thoughts that now filled Ironsyde's mind. They stopped, for Sally was an old acquaintance of both, and Estelle valued the big woman for her resolute character and shrewd sense. Now Sally, on strength of long-standing friendship, grew personal. It was an ancient joke to chaff Miss Groves about marriage, but to-day, when Raymond asked if the net she made was to catch a husband, Sally retorted with spirit. "All very fine for you two to be poking fun at me," she said. "But what about you? It's time you made up your minds I'm sure, for everybody knows you're in love with each other--though you don't yourselves seemingly." "Give us a lead, Sally," suggested Raymond; but she shook her head.