What was happening? She had once told him that she was not a speaker, and he had not believed her. She had begun well, he thought, though with a hesitation he had not expected. But now--had she lost her thread--or what? Incredible! when one remembered her in private life, in conversation. Yet these stumbling sentences, this evident distress! Tressady found himself fidgeting in sympathetic misery. He and Watton looked at each other. A little more, and she would have lost her audience. She _had_ lost it. At first there had been eager listening, for she had plunged straightway into a set explanation and defence of the Bill point by point, and half the room knew that she was Lord Maxwell's wife. But by the end of ten minutes their attention was gone. They were only staring at her because she was handsome and a great lady. Otherwise, they seemed not to know what to make of her. She grew white; she wavered. Tressady saw that she was making great efforts, and all in vain. The division between her and her audience widened with every sentence, and Fontenoy's lady-organiser, in the background, sat smilingly erect. Tressady, who had been at first inclined to hate the thought of her success in this Inferno, grew hot with wrath and irritation. His own vanity suffered in her lack of triumph. Amazing! How _could_ her personal magic--so famous on so many fields--have deserted her like this in an East End schoolroom, before people whose lives she knew, whose griefs she carried in her heart? Then an idea struck him. The thought was an illumination--he understood. He shut his eyes and listened. Maxwell's sentences, Maxwell's manner--even, at times, Maxwell's voice! He had been rehearsing to her his coming speech in the House of Lords, and she was painfully repeating it! To his disgust, Tressady saw the reporters scribbling away--no doubt they knew their business! Aye, there was the secret. The wife's adoration showed through her very failure--through this strange conversion of all that was manly, solid, and effective in Maxwell, into a confused mass of facts and figures, pedantic, colourless, and cold! Edward Watton began to look desperately unhappy. "Too long," he said, whispering in Tressady's ear, "and too technical. They can't follow." And he looked at a group of rough factory-girls beginning to scuffle with the young men near them, at the restless crowd of "greeners," at the women in the centre of the hall lifting puzzled faces to the speaker, as though in a pain of listening. Tressady nodded. In the struggle of devotion with a half-laughing annoyance he could only crave that the thing should be over. But the next instant his face altered. He pushed forward instinctively, turning his back on Watton, hating the noisy room, that would hardly let him hear.