He had worked much harder than Cabinet Ministers generally work,--but hitherto had worked without any reward that was worth his having.

For the stipend which he had received had been nothing to him,--as the great stipend which he would receive, if his hopes were true, would also be nothing to him.

To have ascendancy over other men, to be known by his countrymen as one of their real rulers, to have an actual and acknowledged voice in the management of nations,--those were the rewards for which he looked; and now in truth it seemed as though they were coming to him.
It was all but known that the existing Chancellor of the Exchequer would separate himself from the Government, carrying various others with him, either before or immediately consequent on the meeting of Parliament;--and it was all but known, also, that Mr Palliser would fill his place, taking that high office at once, although he had never hitherto sat in that august assembly which men call the Cabinet.

He could thus afford to put up with the small everyday calamity of having a wife who loved another man better than she loved him.
The presence of the Duke of St Bungay at Matching was assumed to be a sure sign of Mr Palliser's coming triumph.

The Duke was a statesman of a very different class, but he also had been eminently successful as an aristocratic pillar of the British Constitutional Republic.