It was the kind of thing he did himself.
So absorbed was Barode Barouche that he only mechanically heard the chairman announce himself, but when he got to his feet his full senses came back.

The sight of the woman to whom he had been so much, and who had been so much to him for one short month, magnetized him; the face of the boy, so like his own as he remembered it thirty years ago, stirred his veins.

There before him was his own one unacknowledged child--the only child ever born to him.

His heart throbbed.

Then he began to speak.
Never in all his life had he spoken as he did this day.