seat in the North--a handsome man, too, which my father admitted, and
wealthy, being junior partner in a City banking firm. Anna Penrhys knew
him, and treacherously revealed some of the enemy's secrets, notably
concerning what he termed our incorrigible turn for bribery.

'And that means,' my father said, 'that Mr. Hipperdon does not possess
the art of talking to the ladies. I shall try him in repartee on the
hustings. I must contrive to have our Jorian at my elbow.'

The task of getting Jorian to descend upon such a place as Chippenden
worried my father more than electoral anxieties. Jorian wrote, 'My best
wishes to you. Be careful of your heads. The habit of the Anglo-Saxon
is to conclude his burlesques with a play of cudgels. It is his notion
of freedom, and at once the exordium and peroration of his eloquence.
Spare me the Sussex accent on your return.'

My father read out the sentences of this letter with admiring bursts of
indignation at the sarcasms, and an evident idea that I inclined to
jealousy of the force displayed.

'But we must have him,' he said; 'I do not feel myself complete without
Jorian.'

So he made dispositions for a concert to be given in Chippenden town.
Jenny Chassediane was invited down to sing, and Jorian came in her wake,
of course. He came to suffer tortures. She was obliging enough to
transform me into her weapon of chastisement upon the poor fellow for his
behaviour to her at the Ball-atrocious, I was bound to confess. On this
point she hesitated just long enough to imply a doubt whether, under any
circumstances, the dues of men should be considered before those of her