So far as they were concerned, there was no Empire and no Idea; Wallingham might as well not have been born.

It seemed to Lorne that they maintained toward him personally a special reticence about it.
Reticence indeed characterized their behaviour generally during the period between the abandonment of the suits and the arrangement of the second Liberal convention.

They had little advice for him about his political attitude, little advice about anything.

He noticed that his presence on one or two occasions seemed to embarrass them, and that his arrival would sometimes have a disintegrating effect upon a group in the post-office or at a street corner.

He added it, without thinking, to his general heaviness; they held it a good deal against him, he supposed, to have reduced their proud standing majority to a beggarly two figures; he didn't blame them.
I cannot think that the sum of these depressions alone would have been enough to overshadow so buoyant a soul as Lorne Murchison's.
The characteristics of him I have tried to convey were grafted on an excellent fund of common sense.