The girl listened to Luke’s speech with parted lips and flushed face. She was inspired by her lover’s every word and proud for each interruption of applause. She was so inspired and so proud that she did not notice the increasing frigidity of her companion. "Isn’t he wonderful?" she demanded of Nicholson as the meeting ended with the entire audience on its feet. The band was playing "The Star-Spangled Banner," and it had been hoped that the crowd would sing that national anthem. Most of the people present did not, however, know the words, and those who did know them had voices of too slight a range to accede to the severe demands of the music. "Isn’t he just wonderful?" repeated Betty. She caught Nicholson’s arm. "He reminds me of a French orator father and I once heard in the Chamber of Deputies in Paris. You must take me up to the stage to tell him so." Nicholson had listened with mixed emotions. His attention, moreover, was loose because he had lately been much worried by the presence of a heavy debt on his church. "I think he is an excellent speaker," said Nicholson, "but I’m afraid I don’t approve of his tone." "His tone?" Betty turned sharply. "What’s the matter with his tone?" Nicholson’s ascetic face relaxed. He quoted: "Too rash, too unadvis’d, too sudden; Too like the lightning." "He isn’t rash; he’s brave," said Betty. "And he isn’t unadvised or sudden, for he has been thinking of all these things for a long time. But he is like the lightning, and these people he says are so wrong will find that out." §3. Mr. Irwin was at the mass-meeting, too; he of the gray Vandyck beard and pink cheeks and twinkling eyes, the member of the law firm of Stein, Falconridge, Falconridge & Perry, whose name did not appear on the firm’s letter-heads. Irwin left Cooper Union directly the chief speech of the evening ended. He had been seated in an unostentatious corner high in air and close beneath the roof. The people about him must have thought him a warm admirer of the speaker, since he was so busy taking notes of what was said that he had leisure for only the most perfunctory applause. Irwin hurried down the Bowery. He went into the nearest public telephone booth, and from it he called up the hotel in which ex-Judge Stein made his home. §4. Ex-Judge Stein had himself experienced a trying day, and Irwin was absent from the office, or he would have known it. Somebody, it seemed, had asked embarrassing questions of George J. Hallett and issued exacting orders to Hallett, who had passed on the embarrassing questions and the exacting orders to Stein. The questions and the orders gained in intensity by transmission, and Stein was upset. "Yes, yes, this is Judge Stein," he answered into the black transmitter of the telephone when Irwin called him. "Who’s talking, please?" "Irwin." "Eh? Well, where have you been, Mr. Irwin? I have wanted you to-day on some important business.