As he entered his office he was thinking of that girl's face in the
court-room, with its flush of added beauty which he and his speech had
brought there. "What a perfect loveliness!" he said to himself as he
bathed his face and hands, and prepared to go into the street again.
"She needed just such a flush to make her supreme Kathleen!" He stood,
looking out into the square, out into the green of the trees where the
birds twittered. "Faultless--faultless in form and feature. She was so
as a child, she is so as a woman." He lighted a cigarette, and blew away
little clouds of smoke. "I will do it. I will marry her. She will have
me: I saw it in her eye. Fairing doesn't matter. Her uncle will never
consent to that, and she doesn't care enough for him. She cares, but she
doesn't care enough. . . . I will do it."

He turned towards a cupboard into which he had put a certain bottle
before he went to the court-room two hours before. He put the key in the
lock, then stopped. "No, I think not!" he said. "What I say to her
shall not be said forensically. What a discovery I've made! I was dull,
blank, all iron and ice; the judge, the jury, the public, even Kathleen,
against me; and then that bottle in there--and I saw things like crystal!
I had a glow in my brain, I had a tingle in my fingers; and I had
success, and"--his face clouded--"He was as guilty as hell!" he added,
almost bitterly, as he put the key of the cupboard into his pocket again.

There was a knock at the door, and a youth of about nineteen entered.

"Hello!" he said. "I say, sir, but that speech of yours struck us all
where we couldn't say no. Even Kathleen got in a glow over it. Perhaps
Captain Fairing didn't, for he's just left her in a huff, and she's
looking--you remember those lines in the school-book: