Tom started, and Willie took from his button-hole just such a little nosegay as that he had bought on Broadway a fortnight before,—­a geranium leaf, a bit of mignonette, and a delicate tea-rosebud, and, seeing it was drooping, laid it carefully upon the programme on his knee.  “I don’t want that to fade,” he thought as he put it down, while he looked across the platform at the same face which he had so eagerly pursued through a labyrinth of carriages, stages, and people, and lost at last.

“There!  Clara is talking to your beauty.  I wonder if she is to sing, or do anything.  If she does, it will be something dainty and fine, I’ll wager.  Helloa! there’s Clara up,—­now for it.”

Clara’s bright little voice suited her bright little face,—­like her brother’s, only a great deal prettier,—­and the young men enjoyed both, aside from brotherly and cousinly feeling, cheered her “to the echo” as Willie said, threw their bouquets,—­great, gorgeous things they had brought from the city to please her,—­and wished there was more of it all when it was through.

“What next?” said Willie.

“Heaven preserve us! your favorite subject.  Who would expect to tumble on such a theme here?—­’Slavery; by Francesca Ercildoune.’  Odd name,—­and, by Jove! it’s the beauty herself.”

They both leaned forward eagerly as she came from her seat; slender, shapely, every fibre fine and exquisite, no coarse graining from the dainty head to the dainty foot; the face, clear olive, delicate and beautiful,—­

  “The mouth with steady sweetness set,
    And eyes conveying unaware
  The distant hint of some regret
    That harbored there,”—­

eyes deep, tender, and pathetic.

“What’s this?” said Tom.  “Queer.  It gives me a heartache to look at her.”

“A woman for whom to fight the world, or lose the world, and be compensated a million-fold if you died at her feet,” thought Surrey, and said nothing.

“What a strange subject for her to select!” broke in Tom.

It was a strange one for the time and place, and she had been besought to drop it, and take another; but it should be that or nothing, she asserted,—­so she was left to her own device.

Oddly treated, too.  Tom thought it would be a pretty lady-like essay, and said so; then sat astounded at what he saw and heard.  Her face—­this schoolgirl’s face—­grew pallid, her eyes mournful, her voice and manner sublime, as she summoned this Monster to the bar of God’s justice and the humanity of the world; as she arraigned it; as she brought witness after witness to testify against it; as she proved its horrible atrocities and monstrous barbarities; as she went on to the close, and, lifting hand and face and voice together, thrilled out, “I look backward into the dim, distant past, but it is one night of oppression and despair; I turn to the present, but I hear naught save the mother’s broken-hearted shriek, the infant’s wail, the groan wrung from the strong man in agony; I look forward into the future, but the night grows darker, the shadows deeper and longer, the tempest wilder, and involuntarily I cry out, ‘How long, O God, how long?’”