The dinner stood, but there was a desire already more powerful than the appetite for shows, already more efficient in turning the man's mind away from his grim prepossession with his past than any theatre could be, and that was an enormous curiosity and perplexity about this Boomfood and these Boom children--this new portentous giantry that seemed to dominate the world.

"I 'aven't the 'ang of 'em," he said.
"They disturve me." His brother had that fineness of mind that can even set aside a contemplated hospitality.

"It's _your_ evening, dear old boy," he said.
"We'll try to get into the mass meeting at the People's Palace." And at last the man from prison had the luck to find himself wedged into a packed multitude and staring from afar at a little brightly lit platform under an organ and a gallery.

The organist had been playing something that had set boots tramping as the people swarmed in; but that was over now.
Hardly had the man from prison settled into place and done his quarrel with an importunate stranger who elbowed, before Caterham came.

He walked out of a shadow towards the middle of the platform, the most insignificant little pigmy, away there in the distance, a little black figure with a pink dab for a face,--in profile one saw his quite distinctive aquiline nose--a little figure that trailed after it most inexplicably--a cheer.