"We have kept places for you, Miss Windsor and I," said she, with gay kindliness. "Is your father going to speak to-night?" "I think not," answered Mary, her old aversion for Mrs. Carey doubled on the instant. "Then we shall take him too. Shall we go and find him?" Dacre was still standing by the window, and Mary Lincoln, thinking to bring him to her, asked him if the meeting had opened. "Not yet," he said, from his corner; "but they are crowding the platform with speakers." He would have gone to Miss Lincoln, whose earnest nature, as well as her beautiful face, had impressed the single-minded Royalist perhaps more deeply than anything outside the King's own cause. But he did not move, because of his dislike for Mrs. Oswald Carey, founded somewhat on an instinctive doubt of her honesty. Mrs. Oswald Carey, glancing from Mary's face to Dacre's, quietly resolved to keep these two from coming together that evening if she could prevent it. She now urged Mary to take her to her father while she "delivered Miss Windsor's message," a word adopted on the moment; and Mary had to go with her. Meanwhile the meeting in the square had opened, and the voices of the speakers were clearly heard in the drawing-room. It would have been a scene of singularly oppressive character even to a heedless observer; but its unexpressed and perhaps unconscious purport was deeply read by many of those who listened from the balcony and parlors of Mr. Windsor's house. Now and then came from the vast field of faces in the square a rumbling roar that swelled and died like thunder; and then came the single voice of a speaker, stretched like a thin wire, joining roar to roar. All through the proceedings there was never a laugh from the multitude. "Listen!" cried Colonel Featherstone from the balcony, late in the night; "here is a dramatic fellow." The man then addressing the crowd was one who had from his first sentence moved his audience to an extraordinary degree--one of those magnetic voices of the people which flames the word that is smouldering in every heart. He had used no cloak for his meaning, like the other speakers; but boldly attacked the Legitimists, the Monarchy, the titles and the privileges of the aristocracy. "These are things of the past, and not of the future!" sounded from the deep voice. "The England of to-morrow shall have no aristocracy but her wisest and her best, shall have no hereditary rights but the equal right of every Englishman!" Here followed the thunderous approval of the multitude. "Listen!" again cried Featherstone from his advanced place on the balcony. "Listen!"