ing midday languors, seemed to pass into her untrained voice,
lifted and led by the sustaining chorus.

And then suddenly the song was over, and after an uncertain pause,
during which Miss Hatchard's pearl-grey gloves started a furtive
signalling down the hall, Mr. Royall, emerging in turn, ascended the
steps of the stage and appeared behind the flower-wreathed desk. He
passed close to Charity, and she noticed that his gravely set face wore
the look of majesty that used to awe and fascinate her childhood. His
frock-coat had been carefully brushed and ironed, and the ends of his
narrow black tie were so nearly even that the tying must have cost him
a protracted struggle. His appearance struck her all the more because it
was the first time she had looked him full in the face since the night
at Nettleton, and nothing in his grave and impressive demeanour revealed
a trace of the lamentable figure on the wharf.

He stood a moment behind the desk, resting his finger-tips against it,
and bending slightly toward his audience; then he straightened himself
and began.

At first she paid no heed to what he was saying: only fragments of
sentences, sonorous quotations, allusions to illustrious men,
including the obligatory tribute to Honorius Hatchard, drifted past her
inattentive ears. She was trying to discover Harney among the notable
people in the front row; but he was nowhere near Miss Hatchard, who,
crowned by a pearl-grey hat that matched her gloves, sat just below the
desk, supported by Mrs. Miles and an important-looking unknown lady.
Charity was near one end of the stage, and from where she sat the other
end of the first row of seats was cut off by the screen of foliage
masking the harmonium. The effort to see Harney around the corner of the
screen, or through its interstices, made her unconscious of everything
else; but the effort was unsuccessful, and gradually she found her
attention arrested by her guardian's discourse.

She had never heard him speak in public before, but she was familiar
with the rolling music of his voice when he read aloud, or held forth
to the selectmen about the stove at Carrick Fry's. Today his inflections
were richer and graver than she had ever known them: he spoke slowly,
with pauses that seemed to invite his hearers to silent participation in
his thought; and Charity perceived a light of response in their faces.

He was nearing the end of his address... "Most of you," he said, "most of
yo