Leacraft had enough disengagement of thought to half smile to himself at this grandiloquent pretense, but he knew his audience. It was quite British, embued with that cloutish conceit which all popular masses in every successful nation instinctively display. He had appealed to their conceit, though not only to that, and they responded enthusiastically. As he finished this mild buncombe, not without some misgivings as to his own honesty, as he intended at first to repair to the United States, the men nearest to him grasped his hand, others shouted approbation, and still others in silence moved away shaking their heads. Leacraft talked with the men about him. He found that they had been assigned places in the scheme of emigration; some were going to Australia, with a systematic dispersion over the region, which most needed their labor, others to New Zealand into socialistic farming; others to the cape and Rhodesia and still others to Canada; so that his exalted sentiment of solidarity lost a little of its impressiveness. Leacraft lingered a while longer, and as the day ended in a refulgent sunset with church bells, near and far ringing to the services, that now for a week would be held at all hours, inaugurating an unbroken intercession at the throne of grace for the guidance and protection of the people, he left his cordial acquaintances and went westward. He reached Park Lane near the Kensington Gardens, Gloucester House, and the fountain of Thornycroft, the region of Mayfair, the dazzling centre, the illustrious apse of English social splendor, where the inherited privileges of life were not discordantly blended with the no less inherited gifts of fortune; that spot in all London which to relinquish, would seem to sound the depths of national disgrace. The moon swam in the lucent sky, the air was clear, but cold, and the familiar ravishing softness of the June nights as London knew them once, was gone; those illumined mists, the dewyness that spread from the ground to the enveloping air, and threw veil over veil of shimmering opacity upon arch and tower, sward, tree, bridge and storied palace, was all gone, too, and the beautiful neighborhood, as Leacraft wandered through it, from Cumberland Gate--where he saw snow still resting in sheltered recesses--along Park Lane to Hyde Park Corners, through Grosvenor Place to Chapel street, to Belgrave Square, was revealed in an aerial sincerity, that gave its splendor an almost scintillant loveliness, and drove still deeper into Leacraft’s heart the sense of a bewildering bereavement.