't send us."

Geoffrey Ripon felt more like a truant schoolboy approaching a severe
master than he cared to confess even to himself, as he moved through the
crowded room toward Richard Lincoln. But when they met there was nothing
in the manner of either to indicate any unusual feeling.

Mary Lincoln stood near a window, from which she looked over the still
silent but now dense crowd in the square. While she mentally contrasted
the two scenes, that within with that without, she turned her head with
the consciousness of being observed, and met the quiet eyes of Sir John
Dacre, who bowed without a smile.

Mary's strong impulse was to warn him of his danger, at any cost to
herself, and she had taken a step toward him, when she was intercepted
by Mrs. Oswald Carey. The Beauty was splendidly dressed, and a deep
excitement blazed in her eyes.

"We have kept places for you, Miss Windsor and I," said she, with gay
kindliness. "Is your father going to speak to-night?"

"I think not," answered Mary, her old aversion for Mrs. Carey doubled on
the instant.

"Then we shall take him too. Shall we go and find him?"

Dacre was still standing by the window, and Mary Lincoln, thinking to
bring him to her, asked him if the meeting had opened.

"Not yet," he said, from his corner; "but they are crowding the platform
with speakers."

He would have gone to Miss Lincoln, whose earnest nature, as well as her
beautiful face, had impressed the single-minded Royalist perhaps more
deeply than anything outside the King's own cause. But he did not move,
because of his dislike for Mrs. Oswald Carey, founded somewhat on an
instinctive doubt of her honesty.

Mrs. Oswald Carey, glancing from Mary's face to Dacre's, quietly
resolved to keep these two from coming together that evening if she
could prevent it. She now urged Mary to take her to her father while she
"delivered Miss Windsor's message," a word adopted on the moment; and
Mary had to go with her.

Meanwhile the meeting in the square had opened, and the voices of the
speakers were clearly heard in the drawing-room. It would have been a
scene of singularly oppressive character even to a heedless observer;
but its unexpressed and perhaps unconscious purport was deeply read by
many of those who listened from the balcony and parlors of Mr. Windsor's
house.

Now and then came from the vast field of faces in the square a rumbling
roar that swelled and died like thunder; and then came the