“He has not been here once,” she adds, “since I came. I really had some thoughts of breaking my heart for the inconstant creature. I had almost made up my mind that he was dead.”

It may be the gathering gloom of evening, or it may be the darker gloom within herself, but a shade is on my Lady’s face, as if she thought, “I would he were!”

“Mr Tulkinghorn,” says Sir Leicester, “is always welcome here, and always discreet wheresoever he is. A very valuable person, and deservedly respected.”

The debilitated cousin supposes he is “normously rich fler.”

“He has a stake in the country,” says Sir Leicester, “I have no doubt. He is, of course, handsomely paid, and he associates almost on a footing of equality with the highest society.”

Everybody starts. For a gun is fired close by.

“Good gracious, what’s that?” cries Volumnia with her little withered scream.

“A rat,” says my Lady. “And they have shot him.”

Enter Mr Tulkinghorn, followed by Mercuries with lamps and candles.

“No, no,” says Sir Leicester, “I think not. My Lady, do you object to the twilight?”

On the contrary, my Lady prefers it.

“Volumnia?”

Oh! Nothing is so delicious to Volumnia as to sit and talk in the dark.

“Then take them away,” says Sir Leicester. “Tulkinghorn, I beg your pardon. How do you do?”

Mr Tulkinghorn with his usual leisurely ease advances, renders his passing homage to my Lady, shakes Sir Leicester’s hand, and subsides into the chair proper to him when he has anything to communicate, on the opposite side of the Baronet’s little newspaper-table. Sir Leicester is apprehensive that my Lady, not being very well, will take cold at that open window. My Lady is obliged to him, but would rather sit there, for the air. Sir Leicester rises, adjusts her scarf about her, and returns to his seat. Mr Tulkinghorn in the meanwhile takes a pinch of snuff.

“Now,” says Sir Leicester. “How has that contest gone?”

“Oh, hollow from the beginning. Not a chance. They have brought in both their people. You are beaten out of all reason. Three to one.”

It is a part of Mr Tulkinghorn’s policy and mastery to have no political opinions; indeed, no opinions. Therefore he says “you” are beaten, and not “we.”

Sir Leicester is majestically wroth. Volumnia never heard of such a thing. ’The debilitated cousin holds that it’s sort of thing that’s sure tapn slongs votes — giv’n — Mob.

“It’s the place, you know,” Mr Tulkinghorn goes on to say in the fast-increasing darkness, when there is silence again, “where they wanted to put up Mrs Rouncewell’s son.”

“A proposal which, as you correctly informed me at the time, he had the becoming taste and perception,” observes Sir Leicester, “to decline. I cannot say that I by any means approve of the sentiments expressed by Mr Rouncewell, when he was here for some half-hour, in this room; but there was a sense of propriety in his decision which I am glad to acknowledge.”