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