Page:Eliot - Felix Holt, the Radical, vol. I, 1866.djvu/229



Sunday afternoon Felix Holt rapped at the door of Mr Lyon's house, although he could hear the voice of the minister preaching in the chapel. He stood with a book under his arm, apparently confident that there was some one in the house to open the door for him. In fact, Esther never went to chapel in the afternoon: that "exercise" made her head ache.

In these September weeks Felix had got rather intimate with Mr Lyon. They shared the same political sympathies; and though, to Liberals who had neither freehold nor copyhold, nor leasehold the share in a county election consisted chiefly of that prescriptive amusement of the majority known as "looking on," there was still something to be said on the occasion, if not to be done. Perhaps the most