With Brent beside him, he pushed his way to the foyer. There the press was thickened and they were blocked in a corner by the stream of people pouring from the galleries, from which position Harry found himself nodding across to enthusiastic greetings of old acquaintances. "Good heavens!" fumed Brent, impatiently. "We'll never get out at this rate. Let's try the other door." Harry turned with him, seeking a way through the diminishing crowd. Then, abruptly he stopped. Near at hand, her side-face turned toward him, was Echo. Her delicate colour was heightened by an unwonted flush and her eyes shone softly under the curling golden waves of her hair. Gazing in a confusion that was almost panic, Harry felt, with a burning sense of helplessness and cowardice, the impossibility of his position. The sight of her was like a cooling stream to a famished wanderer in the desert. It called to him with a thousand voices, lifting before him every sweet reminder of vanished things. She had not yet seen him, and as the crowd swept her slowly closer, he felt to the full his own blindness and egregious self-assurance that had made this plunge into the old current seem possible. He watched her with a fascinated intensity. She was speaking to some one beside her, her glance wandering. It shifted, then was raised, as if by very attraction, to his face. He saw recognition spring across it like a shaft of sunlight, as with a quick impulse she started forward--then her arm caught itself, as it were, half extended. He felt himself chill in every nerve, the air was breathless. Mechanically his hand touched hers. "You have been gone a year," she said, in a low, uneven voice. Harry's very thought seemed suspended. "Is it--so long?" he answered. He scarcely knew what he said: the reply was a mere involuntary expression of habit, a conventional phrase to fill the moment's need. He could not know that the very repression with which he was holding himself against the quick thrill of her touch made the words lifeless and inconsequential. To Echo, however, in the tremulous gladness that had filled her at the knowledge of his return, and the exaltation of the hour, the reply, deserved as at heart she felt it to be, was like a blow in the face. A startled paleness swept up her cheeks like a wave, blotting their hue and misting the clear April of her eyes. She turned half-away, toward her companion, and the next moment the eddying crowd had come between. On the hurrying pavement Brent dropped his hand on Sevier's shoulder. "I'm not going to congratulate you," he said. "I'm going to congratulate the new party. I'm off to the sanctum to write my editorial while it's red hot. You'll come back for the other session, I suppose. They're liable to nominate to-night." "No," replied Harry. "I must get away from the crowd somewhere."