Indeed, the only purpose that was served by these endeavors was to prove to the unhappy advocate that his nature must be allowed to obey its instincts. He must fulfil his destiny. To that acute intelligence it had come to seem that truth and untruth were identical. It would seem to be born for iconoclasm, for demolition; let it leave to less sophisticated minds the championship of outworn ideas. In this whirlpool of doubt in which he was engulfed, his ideals, his instincts, all those mental resources which garnish with dignity the most protean character, seemed to break from their moorings; and in the very frenzy of this wreck of his stability, there returned upon him in the guise of one of those paradoxes which had become so fatal, a newer, a franker, a more vital conception of his power. There returned in its train the arrogance of his quality. It was not for one of the blood royal to submit to dictation from the mediocrity it despised. Its right was inalienable to obey the forces within itself. He had felt from the first that it was in his power to save this woman; the attorney’s doubts had intervened and for a time had overthrown his faith; but now he had come to believe it again. The thing called “experience,” that eternal standby of the vulgar, was a mere tawdry substitute for intuition in the inferior orders. A great talent incorporated experience within itself. He must suffer no qualm on the score of his youth, his absence of laurels. After all, this brief had been evoked by the exercise of an imperious will in a magic hour; had he not an immemorial right to use it as he chose? Let him obey the divine faculty that had carried him so far, and then if fail he must, at least his failure would be worthy of himself. It was proper for common minds, destitute of all force and originality, to subscribe to the conventions which they set up to protect themselves. Custom, usage, the accretions of centuries may even hallow and exalt them until they assume the guise of religions, but these simulations have nothing to say to the royal among their kind. This powerful impulse, whose impact upon the mind of the advocate was almost terrible, merged the surroundings in itself. Time and place were obliterated; the evening was imperceptibly eaten away. The clocks of the neighborhood gave out the hour of midnight just as Northcote, gasping, with all the breath driven out of his body, emerged from the vortex to grasp his final decision. For six hours he had not been sufficiently accessible to the external to heed the hours as they struck. But now, as the long-drawn strokes announced a new day, a thrill of excitement convulsed his being. The day of all days was at hand. He was standing on the very threshold of the issue. The dread future was about to roll back its veil. Such an emotion was cast upon him that he began to tremble as violently as when he had driven with Mr. Whitcomb to the prison.