She glanced at Mabel, and saw that the girl was singing with all her might, with her eyes fixed on her husband’s dark figure a hundred yards away, and her soul pouring through them.  So the mother, too, began to move her lips in chorus with that vast volume of sound.

As the hymn died away, and before the cheering could begin again, old Lord Pemberton was standing forward on the edge of the platform, and his thin, metallic voice piped a sentence or two across the tinkling splash of the fountains behind him.  Then he stepped back, and Oliver came forward.

* * * * *

It was too far for the two to hear what was said, but Mabel slipped a paper, smiling tremulously, into the old lady’s hand, and herself bent forward to listen.

Old Mrs. Brand looked at that, too, knowing that it was an analysis of her son’s speech, and aware that she would not be able to hear his words.

There was an exordium first, congratulating all who were present to do honour to the great man who presided from his pedestal on the occasion of this great anniversary.  Then there came a retrospect, comparing the old state of England with the present.  Fifty years ago, the speaker said, poverty was still a disgrace, now it was so no longer.  It was in the causes that led to poverty that the disgrace or the merit lay.  Who would not honour a man worn out in the service of his country, or overcome at last by circumstances against which his efforts could not prevail?...  He enumerated the reforms passed fifty years before on this very day, by which the nation once and for all declared the glory of poverty and man’s sympathy with the unfortunate.

So he had told them he was to sing the praise of patient poverty and its reward, and that, he supposed, together with a few periods on the reform of the prison laws, would form the first half of his speech.

The second part was to be a panegyric of Braithwaite, treating him as the Precursor of a movement that even now had begun.

Old Mrs. Brand leaned back in her seat, and looked about her.

The window where they sat had been reserved for them; two arm-chairs filled the space, but immediately behind there were others, standing very silent now, craning forward, watching, too, with parted lips:  a couple of women with an old man directly behind, and other faces visible again behind them.  Their obvious absorption made the old lady a little ashamed of her distraction, and she turned resolutely once more to the square.

Ah! he was working up now to his panegyric!  The tiny dark figure was back, a yard nearer the statue, and as she looked, his hand went up and he wheeled, pointing, as a murmur of applause drowned for an instant the minute, resonant voice.  Then again he was forward, half crouching—­for he was a born actor—­and a storm of laughter rippled round the throng of heads.  She heard an indrawn hiss behind her chair, and the next instant an exclamation from Mabel....  What was that?