"You have good reason to be proud of your _protege_, Miss Wycliffe," he answered, kindling with generous enthusiasm. "Emmet outclassed his opponent completely--in style, in delivery, in subject-matter, and, as it seemed to me, in the justice of his cause. I was so amazed and impressed that I carried the atmosphere of the thing with me until--until I dropped into the chair beside you, and then I forgot all about it." She moved uneasily and toyed with the flowers in her lap, then glanced up at him, but not with the glance of a woman who is ready to listen to a declaration of love. His next words were determined by that look, and there was no little self-renunciation in his pursuance of a subject he would fain have dropped for one nearer his heart. He had to remind himself once more of the shortness of their acquaintance, and of her natural curiosity concerning one of the crises in a struggle which had interested her so keenly. "It only shows how far one's judgments fall below the mark sometimes," he went on. "Not till this afternoon did I get a true perspective of the man, when I saw him standing there, perfectly self-possessed and powerful, reading his speech"-- "Reading!" she interrupted. "Yes, reading, and actually gaining in effectiveness by doing so. It seems that each speaker was allowed only twenty minutes, and rather than run the risk of going off on a tangent, he had written the whole thing out--but he knew it practically by heart." "It was like him," she commented. "He's clever. But what did he say?" Her eager interest, her knowledge of the man, the compliment she paid him, filled Leigh with bitterness of which he was ashamed. He found himself under the necessity of describing to the woman he loved the triumph of another man, who had, as he now saw clearly, appealed to her imagination. To be sure, it was nothing more than that, but as far as it went, it hurt his own cause to play the role of the narrating messenger. He was focussing her attention upon an exciting drama in which he had borne the inglorious part of witness; but he was too proud a man to be ungenerous in his comments, or to let her see the duality of his mental state.