CHAPTER II.
GIDEON VETCH "Your daughter slipped on the ice," explained the young man, while the thought flashed through his mind that Patty's father was accepting it all, with ironical humour, as some queer masquerade.
It was the first time that Stephen had come within range of the Governor's personal influence, and he found himself waiting curiously for the response of his sympathies or his nerves.

Once or twice he had heard Vetch speak--a storm of words which had played freely from the lightning flash of humorous invective to the rolling thunder of passionate denunciation.

Such sound and fury had left Stephen the one unmoved man in the audience.

He had been brought up on the sonorous rhetoric and the gorgeous purple periods of the classic orations; and the mere undraped sincerity--the raw head and bloody bones eloquence, as he put it, of Vetch's speech had been as offensive to his taste as it had been unconvincing to his intelligence.

The man was a mountebank, nothing more, Stephen had decided, and his strange power was simply the reaction of mob hysteria to the stage tricks of the political clown.
Yes, the man was a mountebank--but was he nothing more than a mountebank?
Like most men of his age, Stephen Culpeper was inclined to swift impressions rather than hasty judgments of people; and he was conscious, while he listened in silence to the murmuring explanations of the girl, that the immediate effect was a sensation, not an idea.