ht 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?'"

"Heavens! what an actress she would make!" said somebody before them.

"That's genius," said somebody behind them; "but what a subject to
waste it upon!"

"Very bad taste, I must say, to talk about such a thing here," said
somebody beside them. "However, one can excuse a great deal to beauty
like that."

Surrey sat still, and felt as though he were on fire, filled with an
insane desire to seize her in one arm like a knight of old, and hew his
way through these beings, and out of this place, into some solitary spot
where he could seat her and kneel at her feet, and die there if she
refused to take him up; filled with all the sweet, extravagant,
delicious pain that thrills the heart, full of passion and purity, of a
young man who begins to love the first, overwhelming, only love of a
lifetime.

CHAPTER IV

"_'Tis an old tale, and often told._"

SIR WALTER SCOTT

That evening some people who were near them were talking about it, and
that made Tom ask Clara if her friend was in the habit of doing
startling things.

"Should you think so to look at her now?" queried Clara, looking across
the room to where Miss Ercildoune stood.

"Indeed I shouldn't," Tom replied; and indeed no one would