The two men hurried in, past the flaming chandeliers of the beautiful archway. Upon Leacraft showing his particular cards of admission, an attendant escorted them through the Royal Gallery, the House of Peers, the Peers’ Lobby, all of which were deserted. They chased in most indecorous fashion through the marvellous rooms, only intent upon catching the last words of the great speech whose purport and end was to empty those glorious apartments of their human interest, and bring expatriation upon all the memories they harbored. They passed through the Central Hall, the Commons’ Lobby, the Division Lobby, and were expeditiously inserted in the Reporters’ Gallery, where, backed up against the topmost wall, they surveyed the thronged mass beneath them. Every inch of space, every point of observation was packed, and the scene, on which a softened flood of light fell, with an enhancing effect of wonder, was eloquent in picturesque power and interest. Lords and ladies--to-night no interfering screen concealed the women--earls, dukes, baronets, the clergy, even bishops in their robes, merchants, men of science, bankers, and the whole House of Peers, standing at the bar of the House of Commons, were arrayed in a vast and irrelevant assemblage, pierced by one thought, the anguish of a supreme decision. And Balfour! Upon an erect and stalwart figure, moved by an instinct of regnancy at this sublime instant to stand free of his compeers in the broad way, between the benches of the Government and those of the Opposition, and facing the speaker--all the eyes of that assemblage were riveted. The classic sentences of Macaulay in describing the trial of Warren Hastings--hackneyed as they are by innumerable repetitions--might well apply to this unwonted and intense spectacle; “the long galleries were crowded by an audience such as has rarely excited the fears or the emulations of an orator. There were gathered together from all parts of a great, free, enlightened and prosperous empire, grace and female loveliness and learning, the representatives of every science and every art.” And the comparison can be illuminatively emphasized. At the trial of the illustrious Pro-consul, curiosity in a man, sympathy with a race, admiration for the local splendor of a gorgeous scene, summoned to the hall of William Rufus the resplendent galaxy. But the motives were objective. In the present case, thought Leacraft, how pathetic, how tragic their subjective force. It was as if the children of a home, about to disappear in some horrible engulfment, calmly prepared to leave its threshold, but it was that sorrow multiplied by all the individuals of a nation, and magnified by the moral surrender of the associations of two thousand years. A nervous tension, that was expressed in the almost petrified stare of some faces, the startling pallor of others, the half-open lips, the strained attitudes, the involuntary shudders, the curious grieved looks of inattention,