Now it had assumed an importance.

The squire looked at it with the ardour of a converted eye.

When he told Mr Farquharson that he could bring Moneida with him to a Liberal victory, he thought and spoke of the farmers of the township not of his wards of the Reserve.

Yet as the day approached these would infallibly become voters in his eyes, to swell or to diminish the sum of Moneida's loyalty to the Empire.

They remembered all this in the committee room of his old party.