and trolled from the beery mouths of reeling men staggering from their lost paradise, whose gates closed behind them. They were coming his way, these fallen mortals, with clamorous laughter and ribald shouting. On they straggled, like the rout of Comus, without a leader, the enchanter being left behind, yawningly contemplating his crowded tills.

Frowsy, with dishevelled tresses streaming on the wind, two girls, quite young, but with a debauched, womanly expression, danced along before the rest, hoarsely chanting a doggrel musichall ballad. As they came near, Jack recognised in them the stuff of which his dreams were made. He had often seen them going to work in the morning, carrying their dinners wrapped up in sheets of fiction. These, then, were the factory girls, the victims of the Juggernaut Car of the modern religion of Supply and Demand, ground beneath its wheels without the hopes that soften the anguish of the Hindoo. Was it to be expected that they should "live without opium,” or seek purer sources of joy in their scanty moments of leisure?

Emotion overpowered him. The whole scene with its rowdy figures became one blur to his eyes; he raised his hands in supplication and blessing. Blinded by tears, through the surging words of unspoken prayer, he heard them calling to him with coarse, reckless laughter. And then he felt their hot, panting breaths close upon him, reeking in the heavy air, and they seemed to have recognised him, for, as he brushed the tears away from his eyes, a jeering cry broke upon his ears :

"Mad Jack!"

He turned and gazed into their flushed, dissolute faces with a look of ineffable pity.

Book D.

CHAPTER I.

RUMOUR'S HUNDRED TONGUES.

HE Bobo difficulty was approaching solution. After some weeks of ceaseless telegraphing, questioning, vapouring, ranting, reasoning, and manoeuvring, fluttering half the embassies of Europe, it began to leak out that the island in dispute had no material existence, and as no nation had as yet committed itself to insolent despatches, manifestoes, or ultimatums, there was at least a reasonable hope that the diplomatists would bring their negotiations to an amicable issue.

Meantime, the Reform Bill, amended as the Prime Minister had promised, had received the signature of the Sovereign. Every man or woman, not a criminal in confinement, nor a lunatic, was now seised of a vote as soon as he or she had attained the age of twenty-one; though, as an illustration of how Nature disposes what statecraft proposes, it may be pointed out that only a small minority of unmarried women laid claim to their new privilege. The triumph of Floppington in piloting into port so vast a measure, though his party was in a helpless minority, and though he had had to contend with an envenomed and splendidly-organised Opposition, raised him immensely in the eyes of the country. Moreover, the threatened disintegration of the Ministry had not taken place. The Ministers, who had temporarily wavered in their allegiance, owing to the disturbing influence of Mountchapel, were consciencestricken when they discovered that Floppington was a rising and not waning force. They thought almost with tears of their long attachment to that noble-minded man, and penitently resolved to have nothing more to do with the late Foreign Secretary, at least for the present. Bardolph's political fortunes were for the moment despe

rate.

His faction had hopelessly broken down. After its defeat, one part of it had gone back to the right and the other to the left, and its leader was left stranded. The young and vigorous Conservatives, who had not very long ago looked upon him as the only man who could give new life to the cause, and upon the Premier as the

personification of incompetence, saw that they had under-estimated the subtle transforming influences of power, and recognised with joy that the new Floppington had out-Bardolphed Bardolph in audacity. The desertion of the Ex-Minister by the Old Tories was, if possible, even more complete. Though they had temporarily allied themselves with him to oppose the promised amendment, their motives were not his motives, and even at the moment of their common defeat they experienced a secret joy at the downfall of the whippersnapper, the arrogant bantling against whom they had always cherished a deadly hatred; and the recurrent attacks upon him in their evening paper marked the venting of their longrepressed rancour. Worst of all, the causes of the split in the Tory camp having ceased to exist, they were now ready to lend a loyal support to Floppington.

Thus the only results of Bardolph's political intrigues had been first to make the Cabinet, and then the party, thoroughly unanimous. To have been entrapped when he thought he was setting gins for his rival, to have taken no single step that did not contribute to the popularity, influence, and resources of that rival, these were surely the bitterest drops in his cup of humiliation. In one point alone he had beaten the Premier; but it was a success that, in his opinion, counterbalanced all his defeats. Gwendolen was to be his. The victory he had won was irrevocable, while the triumphs of his adversary were infinitely precarious, and perpetually liable to reversal. But still there was no getting over the fact that for the moment at least his star had paled before Floppington's.

The immense interest excited by the Premier in the contemporary mind was not due simply to his political career. The audacity with which he seized on the ideas which were "in the air," where their original owners had allowed them to escape; the stability of his Cabinet, despite the loss of its strongest member; the thoroughness of his reorganisation of the Conservative party, now more compact than at any previous period since the retirement of Beaconsfield; these topics, interesting as they were, were not so eagerly canvassed as the more dubious items that hovered from lip to lip.

Rumour had indeed been very busy with the name of Floppington during the last six weeks or so. Far and wide spread the news she told, for she has the largest circulation in the world as well as the greatest inaccuracy. She said he was developing various small idiosyncrasies, though she whispered the particulars of them to a select coterie only, putting off the world at large with the hint of a general diffused eccentricity. She said that his new activity in the House was paralleled by his restless participation in the life of society. She said that he was engaged to Lady Harley, that the match had been broken off, that he had never been engaged to her at all, and that the lady in question was about to wed Lord Bardolph Mountchapel. This last item, being confirmed by the silence of the parties interested, profited Bardolph not a little A reflex of the popularity of the charming lady he was going to lead to the altar

irradiated the partially-eclipsed statesman. He had been further damaged by the good faith displayed by Floppington, which made his own vaunted unfaith in the Premier appear the result of spite, and weakened the belief of the millions in the sincerity of his advocacy of the cause of woman. But the manifest confidence of Lady Harley in his earnestness restored that of the world at large. Gwendolen's many gracious acts of kindness had endeared her to the masses, and her successful struggle for Female Suffrage lent additional piquancy to her union with its noble champion.

Thus far Rumour for the present. But the gods were busily nursing on their knees (poor henpecked Olympians! were the goddesses gadding about in fashionable spheres ?) young events soon to be let loose on the world and fated to electrify it with a series of sensations, the like whereof hath been granted to no generation before or since.

From the rise of this sun to power even to the going down thereof, the political and social barometer portended lively weather, occasionally culminating in earthquake with shocks neither few nor gentle. Never before had editors such a good time! Had he remained in the zenith, the silly season would have disappeared from the journalistic almanac. For in the sale of newspapers he was a most valuable element, even before certain suspicions fell upon him. To use the language of the chemists, he was equivalent to a large number of atoms of crime and to a small number of atoms of divorce. He was even capable of displacing one molecule of indecency.

It was on the Premier's love affairs that Rumour's hundred tongues were wagging most busily, each in contradiction of the rest, and so many were the theories that it seemed as if the goddess had "taken on "" a few extra tongues for the occasion.

The simple facts were interpreted as variously as if they had been parts of the life of Hamlet, and had never happened at all The morning papers, as was their wont, preserved a discreet silence when all the world was longing for a word of comment. The Society journals allowed enough traces of their ignorance to be visible to persuade everybody that their information was complete. But at last the general journalistic reserve was rudely shaken off by City Gossip, which came out with an accurately false account of the whole affair, headed "Immorality in the Cabinet." It demanded the reason why the lovely E-B― had been dismissed from her situation at Lady G H-'s? The number, being instantly suppressed, had a sale equalling that of the recently-completed Revised Version, besides similarly varying in price from a shilling to a guinea; and the purchasers of the two were not so distinct as the present-day reader might imagine. The bad thought it was too good to be true, and the good that it was too bad to be false. It was felt with joy by many Liberals, with sorrow by many Conservatives, that the Premier had supplied a powerful argument for Liberalism.

But it was reserved for a later generation to know the truth, or

what is still considered such by flippant magazine writers; for was not the notorious Mr. Postscena engaged on those posthumous memoirs which he intended to bring out as soon as he was old enough to know better? Does not this chronique scandaleuse bid us eschew the crude theories of the vulgar in favour of the subtler scandal which appeals to the educated palate, and which runs that the Premier, who had lately grown fond of power, had entered into a secret arrangement by which Lady Harley was given up to Lord Bardolph, on condition of his retiring from the Cabinet, and that the latter's attack on Floppington was purely Jesuitical?

This hypothesis has the merit of connecting several disparate events; but as it does not readily square with the sequel, the present writer has reluctantly abandoned it as untenable, preferring the methods of the shoals of reviewers who have explained everything on purely natural grounds without the deus ex machind of a secret treaty. With the most painfully precise psychological analysis, many of these have irrefutably demonstrated that the changes in the Premier's attitude towards political problems were necessary points in the evolution of his personality, and that they might have been predicted by the philosophic observer.

With equal profundity it has been shown by others that the development of Conservatism during the latter period of the Ministry of the elder Floppington was not due to the man at all, but was the inevitable result of the antecedent state of Anglican factions, foreign relations, society, religion, ideals, and other abstractions. It was rightly pointed out by Professor Seeley that to attribute this expansion to Floppington (the mere exponent of the progress) was to mistake the shadow for the substance. All rightthinking, that is, all scientific minds would admit that had this particular Premier never been born, English Conservatism would have had a similar history. Thus the then chief of the prophets who never prophesy until they know.

But for a marvel of constructive skill the curious reader must go to the Life of Floppington, by M. N. Dacks. It is as ingeniously put together as any of Fanton's fictions. Wonderful as is the first volume, it is utterly eclipsed by the second, in which the writer's inventiveness, far from being exhausted by a first flight, is fresher than ever. The brilliancy of the book is at its maximum at the present point of the Premier's history, despite the entire failure of documentary evidence, except letters of the most formal description merely signed by the Premier. Hardly the smallest scrap in the Premier's handwriting during this period has been forthcoming; the pressure of extraordinary public business would seem to have prevented familiar and unreserved epistolary intercourse of any description; yet, for all that, the biographer has been able to give the world a highly consistent account of a period of inconsistency. Though the present historian cannot agree with even one of Mr. Dacks's conclusions, he cannot refrain from paying his humble tribute to the fine qualities of style that characterise this evermemorable production.