Even the Tory leaders were disgusted and wearied, and Mr.Balfour was careful, in the very crisis and agony of his fight with the National League, to disavow all sympathy with the strange being that was bringing to his assistance all the mighty resources of an Empire's army, an Empire's exchequer, and an Empire's overwhelming power to crush in blood, in the silence of the cell and the deeper silence of the tomb, all resistance to his imperious will.
[Sidenote: Entry of a ghost.] It must have been with something of a shock that the House of Lords, with all its well-trained and high-bred self-control, found that this curious and fateful figure was within its gates.

Probably, to scarcely half-a-dozen of his colleagues and fellow-peers, was this figure anything but a strange and unexpected incursion from the dim ghost-land, in which, hermit-like, he seems to dwell.

Indeed, the Marquis of Londonderry was careful to explain that he had no personal acquaintance with the man whose case he was defending against the action of the Commission presided over by Mr.Justice Mathew.

And it was easy to see, that Lord Clanricarde was a stranger, and a very lonely one, too, in that assembly in which he is entitled to sit and vote on the nation's destinies.

On a back seat, on the Liberal side of the House, silent, forlorn, unspeaking and unspoken to, he sat throughout the long and tedious debate in which he was a protagonist.