A weary half hour passed. Then the door opened, and the gentlemen filed
in. Erica, half angry, half tired, and wholly miserable, was revolving
in her brain some stinging sentences for her article when the beautiful
face again checked her. Her "Roman," as she called him, had come in, and
was looking round the room, apparently searching for some one. At last
their eyes met, and, with a look which said as plainly as words: "Oh,
there you are! It was you I wanted," he came straight towards her.

"You must forgive me, Miss Raeburn, for dispensing with an
introduction," he said; "but I hardly think we shall need any except the
name of our mutual fried, Charles Osmond."

Erica's heart gave a bound. The familiar name, the consciousness that
her wretched loneliness was at an end, and above all, the instantaneous
perception of the speaker's nobility and breadth of mind, scattered for
the time all her resentful thoughts made her again her best self.

"Then you must be Donovan!" she exclaimed, with the quaint and winsome
frankness which was one of her greatest charms. "I knew I was sure you
were not like other people."

He took her hand in his, and no longer wondered at Brian's seven years'
hopeless waiting. But Erica began to realize that her exclamation had
been appallingly unconventional, and the beautiful color deepened in her
cheeks.

"I beg your pardon," she said, remembering with horror that he was not
only a stranger but an M.P., "I I don't know what made me say that, but
they have always spoken of you by your Christian name, and you have so
long been 'Donovan' in my mind that somehow it slipped out you didn't
feel like a stranger."

"I am glad of that," he said, his dark and strangely powerful eyes
looking right into hers. Something in that look made her feel positively
akin to him. Like a stranger! Of course he had not felt like one. Never
could be like anything but a friend. "You see," he continued, "we have
known of each other for years, and we know that we have one great bond
of union which others have not. Don't retract the 'Donovan' I like it.
Let it be the outward sign of the real and unusual likeness in the fight
we have fought."

She still half hesitated. He was a man of five-and-thirty, and she
could not get over the feeling that her impulsive exclamation had been
presumptuous. He saw her uncertainty, and perhaps liked her the better
for it, though the delicious naturalness, the child-like recognition o