The prisoner refused to say what that troubled conversation was about, but who could question his right to take the risk of his silence being misunderstood?
The judge was alternately taking notes and looking fixedly at the prisoner; the jury were in various attitudes of strained attention; the public sat open mouthed; and up in the gallery a woman with white face and clinched hands listened moveless and staring.

Charley Steele was holding captive the emotions and the judgments of his hearers.

All antipathy had gone; there was a strange eager intimacy between the jurymen and himself.

People no longer looked with distant dislike at the prisoner, but began to see innocence in his grim silence, disdain only in his surly defiance.
But Charley Steele had preserved his great stroke for the psychological moment.

He suddenly launched upon them the fact, brought out in evidence, that the dead man had struck a woman in the face a year ago; also that he had kept a factory girl in affluence for two years.