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 and his love seemed to
engrave itself on his heart; no minutest detail of that evening
escaped him.

He saw the tall, commanding figure of the orator, the vast sea of
upturned faces below, the eager attention imprinted on all,
sometimes a wave of sympathy and approval sweeping over them,
resulting in a storm of applause, at times a more divided
disapproval, or a shout of "No, no," which invariably roused the
speaker to a more vigorous, clear, and emphatic repetition of the