And here they were! The audience made a tumult that was half applause
and half exclamation at a prodigy, and the three women who made their
way on the platform seemed to be moving through the noise as through a
viscid element. The woman doctor, who was to be the chairman, lowered
her curly grey head against it buttingly; Mrs. Ormiston, the mother of
the famous rebels Brynhild, Melissa, and Guendolen, and herself a
heroine, lifted a pale face where defiance dwelt among the remains of
dark loveliness like a beacon lit on a grey castle keep; and Mrs. Mark
Lyle, a white and golden wonder in a beautiful bright dress, moved
swimmingly about and placed herself on a chair like a fastidious lily
choosing its vase. Oh! it was going to be lovely! Wasn't it ridiculous
of that man Yaverland to have stayed away and missed all this glory, to
say nothing of wasting a good half-crown and a ticket which someone
might have been glad of? It just showed that men were hopeless and there
was no doing anything for them.

But then suddenly she saw him. He was standing at one of the entrances
on the other side of the hall, looking tremendous and strange in a
peaked cap and raindashed oilskins, as though he had recently stood on a
heeling deck and shouted orders to cutlassed seamen, and he was staring
at the tumult as if he regarded noise as a mutiny of inferiors against
his preference for calm. By his side a short-sighted steward bent
interminably over his ticket. "The silly gowk!" fumed Ellen. "Can the
woman not read? It looks so inefficient, and I want him to think well of
the movement." Presently, with a suave and unimpatient gesture, he took
his ticket away from the peering woman and read her the number. "I like
him!" said Ellen. "There's many would have snapped at her for that."

She liked, too, the way he got to his seat without disturbing his
neighbours, and the neathandedness with which he took off his cap and