From the Raeburnites came a burst of mingled wrath and grief, and a
bitter outcry against the religion which inevitably they thought tended
to produce such fanatics as Drosser. From the poor and oppressed came a
murmur of blank despair; they had looked upon Raeburn as the deliverer
from so much that now weighed upon them, and were so perfectly conscious
that he understood their wants and difficulties in a way which others
failed to do, that his death in the very prime of manhood simply stunned
them. The liberal-minded felt a thrill of horror and indignation at
the thought that such deeds as this could take place in the nineteenth
century; realizing, however, with a shudder that the rash act of the
ignorant fanatic was, in truth, no worse than the murder of hatred, the
perpetual calumny and injustice which thousands of professing Christians
had meted out to Raeburn. In nothing had the un-Christlikeness of the
age been more conspicuous than in the way in which Raeburn had all his
life been treated.

The fashionable world felt a sort of uncomfortableness. The news reached
them at their laziest time of year; they came in from shooting parties
to read the account in the papers; they discussed it in ball rooms
and at evening parties at Brighton and Greyshot and the other autumnal
resorts. "So he was dead! Well, really they were tired of hearing his
name! It was rather horrible, certainly, that his daughter should have
seen it all, but such infamous creatures as Raeburn had no business
to have daughters. No doubt she would stand it very well anything, you
know, for a little notoriety. Such people lived for notoriety. Of course
the papers had put in a lot of twaddle that he had said on his death bed
'always had tried to work entirely for the good of humanity,' and that
sort of nonsense. This coffee ice is excellent. Let me get you another,"
after which the subject would be dropped, and the speakers would return
to the ball room to improve upon Raeburn's life, which they presumed so
severely to criticize, by a trois temps enlivened by a broad flirtation.

Here and there a gleam of good was effected inasmuch as some of the
excessively narrow began to see what narrowness leads to. Mr. Cuthbert,
coming home from his annual Swiss tour, was leaning back sleepily in
a first-class carriage at the Folkestone station when the voice of a
newsboy recalled him to the every-day world with a slight shock. There
was the usual list of papers;