The idea that had flashed through old Jack Byrne's mind, preposterously exaggerated as it had at first seemed to him, was nevertheless correct. When Joyce arrived at Messrs. Potter and Fyfe's office, he found there not merely those gentlemen, but with them several of the leading members of the party, and a deputation of two or three Liberals from Brocksopp, with whom Joyce was acquainted. Mr. Moule and Mr. Spalding, nervously excited, stepped forwards and shook hands with the young man in a jerky kind of manner. Immediately afterwards, backing again towards their chairs, on the extremest edge of which they propped themselves, they hid their hands in their coat-sleeves, and looked round in a furtive manner. After a few formal speeches, Mr. Potter proceeded at once to business. Addressing Joyce, he said it was probably known to him that the gentleman on whom they had hitherto depended as a candidate for Brocksopp had thrown them over, and at the eleventh hour had left them to seek for another representative. In a few well-chosen and diplomatically rounded sentences, Mr. Potter pointed out that the task that Mr. Bokenham had imposed upon them was by no means so difficult a one as might have been imagined. Mr. Potter would not, he said, indulge in any lengthened speech. His business was simply to explain the wishes of those for whom he and his partner had the honour to act--here he looked towards the leaders of the party, who did not attempt to disguise the fact that they were growing rather bored by the Potterian eloquence--and those wishes were, in so many words, that Mr. Joyce should step into the place which Mr. Bokenham had left vacant. One of the leaders of the party here manifesting an intention of having something to say, and wishing to say it, Mr. Fyfe promptly interposed with the remark that he should be able to controvert an assertion, which he saw his young friend Mr. Joyce about to make, to the effect that he would be unable to carry on the contest for want of means. He, Mr. Fyfe, was empowered to assert that old Mr. Bokenham was so enraged at his son's defalcation, which he believed to have been mainly brought about by Tory agency, Lord Steppe's father, the Earl of Stair, being a notoriously bigoted Blue, that he was prepared to guarantee the expenses of any candidate approved of by the party and by the town. Mr. Fyfe here pausing to take breath, the leader, who had been previously baulked, cut in with a neat expression of the party's approval of Mr. Joyce, and Mr. Spalding murmured a few incoherent words to the effect that during a life-long acquaintance with his young friend the people of Brocksopp had been in entire ignorance that he had anything in him, politically or otherwise, beyond book-learning, and that was the main reason for their wishing him to represent them in Parliament.