With more insight into the circumstances surrounding him Ford would have told his tale with greater reticence.  As it was he spoke with enthusiasm, an enthusiasm born of an honest desire that Conquest should see the woman he was about to marry in the full beauty of her character.  In regard to this he himself had made the discovery so slowly and so recently that he was animated by something like a convert’s zeal.  Beginning his narrative quietly, in a reminiscent vein, with intervals in which he lapsed altogether into meditation, he was presently fired with all the animation in a story-teller when he perceives he is holding his hearer spellbound.  As a matter of fact, he was moved not so much by the desire of convincing Conquest of Miriam Strange’s nobility, as by the impulse to do her justice, once in his life at least, in language of his own.

It was a naA-ve bit of eloquence, of which no detail was lost on the experienced man of the world, who sat twirling his cigar with nervous fingers, his eyes growing keener in proportion as his face became more gray.  It was part of his professional acquirement to be able to draw his deductions from some snatch of human drama as he listened to its unfolding.  His quickness and accuracy of judgment had, indeed, been a large element in his success; so that the habit of years enabled him to preserve a certain calmness of comprehension now.  It lost nothing in being a studied calmness, since the forcing of his faculties within restraint concentrated their acumen.

Ford concluded with what for him was an almost lyric outburst.

“By George!  Conquest, I didn’t know there were such women in the world.  She’s been a revelation to me—­as art and religion are revelations to other people.  She came to me as the angel came to Peter in the prison; but, like Peter, I didn’t know it was an angel.  There’s a sort of glory about her—­a glory which it takes a higher sense than any I’ve got to see and understand.  After all she’s done for me—­after all this time—­I’m only now beginning to get glimpses of it; but it’s merely as we get glimpses of an infinite beyond, because we see the stars.  She’s a mystery to me, in the same way that genius is a mystery, or holiness.  I didn’t appreciate her because I hadn’t the soul, and yet it’s in seeing that I hadn’t the soul that I begin to get it.  That’s curious, isn’t it?  She’s like some heavenly spirit that’s passed by me, and touched me into newness of life.”

His ardor was so sincere, his hymn of praise so spontaneous that he expected some sort of echo back.  It seemed to him that even if Conquest did not join in this chant in honor of the woman who presumably loved him, whom more presumably still he loved, it would be but natural for him to applaud it.  Ford knew that if any one else had sung of Miriam Strange as he had just been singing, he would have leaped to his feet and wrung the man’s hand till it ached.  It surprised him, therefore, it disappointed him, that Conquest should sit unmoved, unless the spark-like twinkle of his little eyes could be taken as emotion.