g smile and said:
"Thanks, old man." Again the tumult broke out. Men cheered and women
wept and waved wet handkerchiefs. And he stood smiling at his unseen
audience. When he spoke, his deep, beautifully modulated voice held
everyone under its spell, and he spoke modestly and gaily like a brave
gentleman. I bent forward, as far as I was able, and scanned his face.
Never once, during the whole ceremony, did the tell-tale twitch appear
at the corners of his lips. He stood there the incarnation of the
modern knights sans fear and sans reproach.

I cannot tell which of the two, he or Sir Anthony, the more moved my
wondering admiration. Each exhibited a glorious defiance.

You may say that Boyce, receiving in his debonair fashion the encomiums
of the man whom he had wronged, was merely exhibiting the familiar
callousness of the criminal. If you do, I throw up my brief. I shall
have failed utterly to accomplish my object in writing this book. I
want no tears of sensibility shed over Boyce. I want you to judge him
by the evidence that I am trying to put before you. If you judge him as
a criminal, it is my poor presentation of the evidence that is at
fault. I claim for Boyce a certain splendour of character, for all his
grievous sins, a splendour which no criminal in the world's history has
ever achieved. I beg you therefore to suspend your judgment, until I
have finished, as far as my poor powers allow, my unravelling of his
tangled skein. And pray remember too that I have sought all through to
present you with the facts PARI PASSU with my knowledge of them. I have
tried to tell the story through myself. I could think of no other way
of creating an essential verisimilitude. Yet, even now, writing in the
light of full knowledge, I cannot admit that, when Boyce in that Town
Hall faced the world--for, in the deep tragic sense Wellingsford was
his world--anyone knowing as much as I did would have been justified in
calling his demeanour criminal callousness.

I say that he exhibited a glorious defiance. He defied the concrete
Gedge. He defied the more abstract, but none the less real, tormenting
Furies. He defied remorse. In accepting Sir Anthony's praise he defied
the craven in his own soul.

After a speech or two more, to which I did not listen, the proceedings
in the Town Hall ended. I drew a breath of relief. No breakdown by Sir
Anthony, no scandalous interruption by Gedge, had marred the impressive
ceremony. The band in the