During this prolonged, grappling struggle he had never been to Midfields. He had seen Echo but occasionally, walking or driving on the street, or less frequently at functions from which he could not absent himself without remark. There had been no confidences between them. Never had he leaned to her to whisper: "You see! Do I do well?" Never had her lips said, "I know ... I know, and I am watching!" yet his heart had told him that she was alive to the issue, that she felt the forces conflicting for the mastery. She had not been in the audience on this day, but as the faces pulsed and receded till they wove into a grey blur in the misty blaze of the incandescents, Harry's inner vision had a swift memory of her face as it had looked in that old court-house scene. And with it, as though it had been a key to the disused mental machinery, strangely and wonderfully there had come back to him, in a sudden flashing illumination like summer lightning, a surging return of the old power, the vivid rush of lambent images in his brain and the burning, insistent phrase to his tongue--the power that he had thought gone forever with that shuddering failure of a year before. As he felt again the old native ability rising in him, strong and undismayed, and once more his own, without hostage given to the bottle, a stinging delight had swept through him. It was the fruit of victory, and fiercely sweet in proportion to the bitterness of the struggle. Yet in his new sensitiveness the realisation had held a flicker of self-shame. Never in those old days had he employed that talent for the greater good: only for individual ambition, often for the blunt defeating of the clear ends of justice! It was another Harry Sevier who spoke now, one to whom conscience now stood as mentor, to whom principle was become a guiding star. The leashed power and restraint had been bred of that long struggle, and from the fresh mastery of self which he had so hardly gained, flowed forth a subtle magnetic quality that held his listeners mute. In the hush that wrapped the great assemblage the speaker of the day, late by an hour, had entered the back of the stage, to wave back the nonplussed chairman and to seat himself in the rear, enthralled by the white magic that swayed all alike. The speech had held no rodomontade, none of the pyrotechnics that, had lent a flavour of sensation to past court trials. It had been on a higher plane than appeal to superficial feeling or ingrained prejudice. It had brought no accusation, pointed no finger, save backward to old ideals of community respect, and forward to the wave of independent thought that was sweeping over sister states to break in thundering force upon the crags of misrule. It had closed in a note of hope and of promise, and ended with the hall hushed in that greatest tribute to true oratory--absolute silence.