t Charles Osmond
noticed that as he spoke he drew the child nearer to him, with a
momentary look of trouble in his face, as though he shrunk from taking
her through the rabble. Erica, on the other hand, looked interested
and perfectly fearless. With great difficulty they forced their way
on, hooted and yelled at by the mob, who, however, made no attempt at
violence. At length, reaching the shelter of the entrance lobby, Raeburn
left them for a moment, pausing to give directions to the door keepers.
Just then, to his great surprise, Charles Osmond caught sight of his
son standing only a few paces from them. His exclamation of astonishment
made Erica look up. Brian came forward eagerly to meet them.

"You here!" exclaimed his father, with a latent suspicion confirmed into
a certainty. "This is my son, Miss Raeburn."

Brian had not dreamed of meeting her, he had waited about curious to
see how Raeburn would get on with the mob; it was with a strange pang
of rapture and dismay that he had seen his fair little ideal. That she
should be in the midst of that hooting mob made his heart throb with
indignation, yet there was something so sweet in her grave, steadfast
face that he was, nevertheless, glad to have witnessed the scene. Her
color was rather heightened, her eyes bright but very quiet, yet as
Charles Osmond spoke, and she looked at Brian, her face all at once
lighted up, and with an irresistible smile she exclaimed, in the most
childlike of voices:

"Why, it's my umbrella man!" The informality of the exclamation seemed
to make them at once something more than ordinary acquaintances. They
told Charles Osmond of their encounter in the afternoon, and in a very
few minutes Brian, hardly knowing whether he was not in some strange
dream, found himself sitting with his father and Erica in a crowded
lecture hall, realizing with an intensity of joy and an intensity of
pain how near he was to the queen of his heart and yet how far from her.

The meeting was quite orderly. Though Raeburn was addressing many
who disagreed with him, he had evidently got the whole and undivided
attention of his audience; and indeed his gifts both as rhetorician and
orator were so great that they must have been either willfully deaf or
obtuse who, when under the spell of his extraordinary earnestness and
eloquence, could resist listening. Not a word was lost on Brian; every
sentence which emphasized the great difference of belief between himself
a