Mr. Roquevillard took off his lawyer’s cap and stood up. He glanced in turn, quite deliberately, at his daughter and his son, and gathered hope and confidence from the sight of them. Silence fell on the room immediately, a silence deep and throbbing with expectation, that made people hold their breath and their hearts stand still. This man with the almost white hair, this old man with his record of more than sixty years of probity and talent and upright living, who stood forth as the sole representative of so many generations of honourable and patriotic men, uttered, by the mere act of rising to his feet, an eloquent protest against the calumnies and defamation with which the long argument for the plaintiff had tried to overwhelm his race. Had they not insinuated even that La Vigie had been sold to pay back money that had not all been squandered by the thief? It was a protest made before a word was spoken, and one that all the Battards in the world could not have impressed more forcefully upon the audience. The court-room clock marked the hour of three. The old lawyer had risen slowly to his feet, and now drew himself to his full height; his head, erect, showed clearly in the broad band of light marked out by the rays of the pale sun, too pale now to inconvenience those on whom it fell. His high, bare forehead, his finely accentuated features, dulled by age, but nevertheless still full of pride, his stiffly curled moustache, made up a fighter’s face, a leader’s, that one could not behold without an impression of forcefulness and keen and eager living. But the flame that dwelt habitually in his deep eyes, once so sharply imperious, now shone with complete serenity rather than with any lust of conquest. “Broken down, do you say? Just look at him,” protested the lady under Mr. Coulanges’s escort. “And yet I don’t recognise him any more,” observed Mr. Paillet. Margaret and Mr. Hamel, on the contrary, all attention, and quite vibrating with anxiety, recognised in him the same superhuman exaltation that he had brought back from that strange walk to La Vigie the night before. He began his remarks in a voice that was rather low, a fact which inspired Mr. Battard, not without some satisfaction, it must be confessed, to remark that: “His fine organ isn’t what it was.” Then, abruptly, as a curtain is drawn apart, his voice opened up clearly, sounded the rallying call, the summons to the dead, who last evening on the icy shadowed slopes of the hills had made up his phantom army. There was a living silence in the room, heavy and storm-laden, and he plowed through it like a vessel through the sea.