With that he rose and felicitated the company on the arrival of the two distinguished servants of the City and the Nation between whom he now had the honour to sit.
He then introduced Colonel Edwards, a stout, quite unmilitary-looking gentleman, who was earnestly interested and mildly interesting on the subject of good roads for the space of fifteen minutes.
Merriam's attention was distracted almost at the beginning of Colonel Edwards' speech by the arrival at the entrance of the dining room, now directly opposite him, of the second taxi-load from the hotel. Alicia caught Merriam's eye and smiled at him mischievously. Evidently she was enjoying the situation to the full. Mollie June, on the other hand, though deliciously crowned with a small blossomy hat of obvious expensiveness, was entirely grave, her eyes fixed almost too steadily and too anxiously on our youthful hero, where he sat in the seats of the mighty, outwardly at least as much at ease as if he had been accustomed for thirty years to find himself at the speakers' table of historic clubs.
Colonel Edwards suddenly sat down. He was one of those rare public speakers who occasionally disconcert their audiences by stopping when they are through.
The toastmaster gasped, but rose to his feet and the occasion and called upon Mayor Black.
As the Mayor slowly rose Merriam was most uncomfortably anxious--uncertain whether the city's chief executive was even yet sufficiently master of himself to face an audience successfully. But Mr. Black was one of those gentlemen, not uncommon in public life, who are apparently more at ease before an audience than in any other situation. His great mellow voice boomed forth, and Merriam relaxed. That speech was hardly, perhaps, one of the Mayor's masterpieces. But that mattered little, of course. He produced an admirably even flow of head tones. It sounded like a perfectly good speech.
Merriam, at any rate, was quite oblivious of any lack of strict logical coherence in the Mayor's remarks. He was suddenly smitten by the realisation that his own turn came next. For a moment he fought a panic of blankness, then mentally grabbed at the opening sentences of what he had so carefully committed during the morning. Outwardly serene and attentive to the speaker, inwardly he hastily rehearsed his first half dozen paragraphs, and, winking his eyes somewhat rapidly perhaps, fixed the outline of the rest of it in his mind.
The Mayor rose to a climax of thunderous tone and eloquent gesture and sat. Loud applause followed.
Across the clapping hands Merriam glanced at Mr. Wayward and Alicia and Mollie June where they sat at one side of the horseshoe. The other two were clapping, but Mollie June was not. He thought she looked pale, but of course he was too far away to be sure. "She is afraid for me," he thought, and gratitude for her interest mingled with a fine resolve to show her that she had no cause for fear--that he would give a good account of himself anywhere--for her.
The glow of that resolution carried him through the ordeal of the toastmaster's introduction and brought him to his feet with smiling alacrity at the proper moment.