cast a foreboding sadness over the beauty of his own ancestral home. It
tainted even his unuttered pride in his son, who had been at Eton
without expulsion, and served two years in the Foot Guards without
discredit. And now, there was his grandson.

What future could be theirs? Should a Runnymede sit in a House shorn of
its prerogatives, bound to impotence, reduced to a mere echo of popular
caprice, with hardly the delaying power of a chaperon at a ball? Or
should a son of his trot round from door to door, seeking the suffrages
of those distressing suburbs at the polls--a son whose ancestry had
known the favour of princes, and withstood foes and traitors upon the
field? Lord Runnymede himself had never thought of election, even before
the House of Lords received him. Yet if you wanted representatives, who
was more truly representative of his own estates and the interests of
every soul upon it--interests identical with his own? Who was more fit
to control the country than a man who had breathed the atmosphere of
State from childhood, and learnt history from the breast-plates, the
swords, the cloaks, the wigs, and the side-whisker portraits of men
whose very blood beat in his heart?

As the carriage went down Piccadilly, he was overwhelmed with the
darkness of the prospect. He saw an ancient country staggering from side
to side on its road to ruin, while the hands which had directed and
steadied it for centuries lay bound or idle. He saw coverts and meadows
and cornfields eaten away by desirable residences, angular garden
cities, and Socialist communities. He saw his own Stennynge advertised
for plots, and its relics catalogued for a museum, while factories
spouted smoke from its lawns and shrubberies, and if a Runnymede
survived, he lived in a rough-cast villa, like an eagle in a cage at
the Zoo. The soul of all his ancestors rose within him. Never should it