With the morning he felt no misgiving or shadow of self-doubt. His mind temporarily was clear and untroubled, all of the vexing problem was pushed, by the singleness of his purpose, into the unknown future. By his express wish, his arrival had not been published, and, except for a few of its leaders with whom Brent had conferred, the circles of the convention, then in session in the biggest auditorium the city boasted, were no more aware than were the hosts of his friends, of his coming. He spent the morning alone in his room, sitting movelessly hour after hour, marshalling his ideas, assembling his forces, stirred as he had never before been stirred by the quick suggestion of a living issue and an unrivalled opportunity. He lunched quietly alone with Brent in a private room at the club, and immediately afterward drove with him to the hall. Throughout the morning the platform had been under discussion; the debate was now about finished. It was the psychological moment for his effort. As Harry stood silent before the sea of faces, in the instant that followed his recognition and introduction, he was conscious of a tense and vital concentration that swept from him the last vestige of self-consciousness. With his first measured words, too, the outline which he had pondered during the morning vanished utterly from his brain. He remembered nothing save the one thing he had come to do, saw with his mind's eye only the monstrous evil against which he stood. Words came to him in a flood--words magically compelling, that burned and quivered in their intense appeal. For an hour he held the interest of the great assembly as no orator had done, sketching with hard and pitiless directness the ramifications of the grim traffic that blasted whatsoever it touched, that knew no social bar, before which the magnate's mansion and the labourer's tenement were as one, against which no bolt or chain--save it be one wrought by the law of a Sovereign Commonwealth--might avail.