God gave the steel-hearted little man strength to go through the ordeal.  He delivered his carefully prepared oration in a voice that never faltered.  The passages referring to Boyce’s blindness he spoke with an accent of amazing sincerity.  When he had ended the responsive audience applauded tumultuously.  From my seat by the edge of the platform I watched Betty.  Two red spots burned in her cheeks.  The addresses were read, the caskets presented.  Boyce remained standing, about to respond.  He still held the casket in both hands.  His fidus Achates, guessing his difficulty, sprang up, took it from him, and laid it on the table.  Boyce turned to him with his charming 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.