French as crude as his own was perfect. When
he spoke, which was at rare intervals, his voice was without feeling,
concise, insistent, unappealing. It was as though the business before
him was wholly alien to him, as though he were held there against his
will, but would go on with his task bitterly to the bitter end.

The court adjourned for an hour at noon. During this time Charley
refused to see any one, but sat alone in his office with a few biscuits
and an ominous bottle before him, till the time came for him to go back
to the court-house. Arrived there he entered by a side door, and was not
seen until the court opened once more.

For two hours and a half the crown attorney mercilessly made out his
case against the prisoner. When he sat down, people glanced meaningly
at each other, as though the last word had been said, then looked at the
prisoner, as at one already condemned.

Yet Charley Steele was to reply. He was not now the same man that had
conducted the case during the past two days and a half. Some
great change had passed over him. There was no longer abstraction,
indifference, or apparent boredom, or disdain, or distant stare. He
was human, intimate and eager, yet concentrated and impelling: he was
quietly, unnoticeably drunk.

He assured the prisoner with a glance of the eye, with a word scarce
above a whisper, as he slowly rose to make his speech for the defence.

His first words caused a new feeling in the courtroom. He was a new
presence; the personality had a changed significance. At first the
public, the jury, and the judge were curiously attracted, surprised into
a fresh interest. The voice had an insinuating quality, but it also
had a measured force, a subterranean insistence, a winning tactfulness.
Withal, a logical simplicity governed his argument. The flaneur,
the poseur--if such he was--no longer appeared. He came close to the
jurymen, leaned his hands upon the back of a chair--as it were, shut out
the public, even the judge, from his circle of interest--and talked in a
conversational tone. An air of confidence passed from him to the amazed
yet easily captivated jury; the distance between them, so gaping
during the last two days, closed suddenly up. The tension of the past
estrangement, relaxing all at once, surprised the jury into an almost
eager friendliness, as on a long voyage a sensitive traveller finds
in some exciting accident a natural introduction to an exclusive
fellow-passenger,