Page:The time spirit; a romantic tale (IA timespiritromant00snaiiala).pdf/252

 were not as other men. Born to that convenient dogma, or at least having imbibed it with the milk of infancy, it was in the very marrow of his bones. But now, it would seem, the Time Spirit had overtaken the order to which he belonged.

Twin portents of that fact had hovered all night round his pillow. First came the business of Jack and the lady of his choice, who at close quarters had proved to be so much more than his Grace had bargained for; then there was the minor yet entirely vexing complication of Muriel and her Berserker of a Radical.

Compared with the first gigantic issue, the second was a mere sideshow, which in a happier hour his Grace would have treated with sardonic contempt. After all, did it greatly matter if Muriel had the ill taste to prefer an obvious political thruster and arriviste to a state of single blessedness? The heavens were not likely to fall in either case. The man was a cad and there was no more to be said, yet even Albert John was not quite able to maintain the standpoint of High Olympus. Such a mountebank of a fellow ought not to count, yet when the best had been said there was something about the brute which rankled horribly.

Some years before, in a historic speech in the Gilded Chamber, the Duke had drawn a lurid picture of democracy knocking at the gate. His words were so nakedly obvious that in a single morning they awoke to fame throughout a flattered and delighted island. Everybody had known for a generation that democracy was knocking at the gate, but the true art of prophecy as a going concern is to predict the event the day after it happens.