"No," I exclaimed, with energy; "promise that I may go out and receive Owlsdarck alone, or I cannot go to Dr. Dastick's."
"I doubt if there would be any precedent for this," argued the Colonel, gravely.
"Then we must make one," I asserted. "For surely nothing is more appropriate than that a lecturer, returning from his exercise, whether in triumph or defeat, should be first encountered by some brother of the craft who can have adequate sympathy with his feelings."
After some demur, Colonel Prowley consented to adopt this view of the case; and we passed out of the hot lecture-room into the still, fresh night. Here Kate took my arm and we managed for an instant to lag behind the crowd.
"I am not mad yet," I said, "though when I began that extraordinary lecture you must have thought me so."
"For a few moments," replied my wife, "I was utterly bewildered; but soon, of course, I guessed the explanation. You appeared before the Foxden audience with Professor Owlsdarck's lecture."
"And he appeared with my poem before the audience in Wrexford."
"Good Heavens!" exclaimed Kate, "I never thought of that part of it!"
"Yet that is the part of it of which it behooves us to think just at present," I replied. "To my utter amazement, there has been something, either in the Professor's wisdom or in my rendering of it, that has taken with the audience. Not knowing what Owlsdarck has done, or may wish to do, I have not explained the humiliating and ridiculous blunder,—though I have stoutly denied myself any credit for the information or composition of the lecture."
"But the Professor couldn't have read your poem at Wrexford?"