o her, and
his instinct forbade such an obvious beginning. He spoke, therefore,
only of the refreshing contrast of their asylum with the noise and
glare of the drawing-rooms, noting with a passing pang as he did so
that the lilies of the valley which she had carried with her thus far
were drooping in her lap, their expiring odour quenched by the heavy
fragrance about them.

Perhaps it was a touch of feminine perversity that led her to acquiesce
in his animadversions upon the scene they had just left. It was
certainly a function in which she was peculiarly fitted to shine, and
she had taken her part with every appearance of enjoyment; yet her
comments were more caustic than his own.

"The lecture was the better part," she declared. "I wish it had been
longer--but you missed a good deal of it."

"Yes," he explained. "I didn't get away from the debate till after six
o'clock."

"The debate!" she echoed, fixing him with an interested gaze. "I had
forgotten that this was the evening. Tell me about it. Did your
tentative efforts with Mr. Emmet bear any fruit, after all?"

He shook his head, smiling. "It was an extraordinary spectacle," he
mused. "The pit and the balconies, the aisles, the space at the back,
and the stairs down to the sidewalk were filled with labourers, packed
close together, their dinner-pails in their hands and their pipes in
their mouths. You could have cut the air with a knife into chunks of
tobacco smoke."

"And how did he seem?" she asked.

"You have good reason to be proud of your _protege_, Miss Wycliffe," he
answered, kindling with generous enthusiasm. "Emmet outclassed his
opponent completely--in style, in delivery, in subject-matter, and, as
it seemed to me, in the justice of his cause. I was so amazed and
impressed that I carried the atmosphere of the thing with me
until--until I dropped into the chair beside you, and then I forgot all
about it."

She moved uneasily and toyed with the flowers in her lap, then glanced
up at him, but not with the glance of a woman who is ready to listen to
a declaration of love. His next words were determined by that look,
and there was no little self-renunciation in his pursuance of a subject
he would fain have dropped for one nearer his heart. He had to remind
himself once more of the shortness of their acquaintance, and of her
natural curiosity concerning one of the crises in a struggle which had
interested her so keenly.

"It only shows