The audience, gentle and simple, applauded everything vociferously, and when the pale young lady forgot her words, applauded louder than ever. A lady and gentleman sang the “Glou Glou” duet, which, though they had practiced it, say, two hundred times, was not quite in time even then; and then the vicar, adjusting his eyeglasses, announced that Mr. Faradeane had kindly consented to give them a recitation. Every eye turned upon the handsome, grave-faced man in the corner, and Olivia’s among them. He rose, amid the stamping and clapping which welcomed every announcement, and slowly and unobtrusively mounted the platform. For a moment he looked round, as if to ascertain the size of the room. Then, in a low, but clear tone, said, “The Dream of Eugene Aram.” Everybody knows the poem. It is the best of Tom Hood’s, far and away, and he was a poet of no mean order. It is the confession of a murder made to a schoolboy by the usher, who pretends that he is only telling a dream, whereas he is really giving every detail of his crime, and the remorse that haunts him. Faradeane began, in a light tone that reached the remotest corner of the room, to describe the school and the boys, and then gradually, and yet as it seemed suddenly, to assume the character of the murderer, upon whose conscience the crime rides so terribly that he feels constrained to confess it. Gradually the voice grew deeper, graver, more intense; and as he approached the verse which tells of the crime, the silence in the crowded room was intense. Step by step the confession proceeded, until it reached the point where the murderer in vain endeavors to conceal the body of the man he has slain, and at this point the voice, the gesture, the very face of the reciter were so awful that a shudder ran through the audience, and from the center of the room a woman’s sobs rose audibly. Olivia sat, her eyes fixed on Faradeane’s face, her heart almost motionless. She had seen good actors in their strongest characters, but she had seen nothing more terrible than this “Dream of Eugene Aram” as recited in the village schoolroom. Every now and then a thrill of horror shot through her; then, as the guilty man told of the remorse that haunted him as he stood among the school children, all so pure and innocent, and tried, unavailingly, to join in their evening prayers and hymns, she felt the tears rise to her eyes, and a big lump grow in her throat. The effect was awful, and when, in his ordinary tone, the reciter wound up with the lines which record the arrest of the guilty usher, she sank back with a sigh of pity and relief. For a moment or two the audience stared at the reciter, at this stranger with the handsome face and sad, dark eyes, in awful silence; then Lord Carfield broke the spell by a vigorous clapping of hands, and amid a storm of applause, Mr. Faradeane, with a faint smile, stepped quietly and slowly from the platform. As he did so he glanced--was it by accident?--toward Olivia.