A single gift, indefinable yet unerring--the ability to make men believe absurdities, as John Benham had once said--and the material disadvantages of poverty and ignorance were brushed aside like trivial impediments.

A strange power, and a dangerous one in unscrupulous hands, the young man reflected.
"I remember your face," pursued the Governor, while his smile faded--was brevity, after all, the secret of its magic?
"You were at one of my speeches last autumn, and you sat in the front row, I think.

I recall you because you were the only person in the audience who looked bored." "I was." Frankness called for frankness.

"I am not keen about speeches." "Not even when Benham speaks ?" The voice was gay, but through it all there rang the unmistakable tone of authority, of conscious power.

There was one person, Stephen inferred, who had never from the beginning disparaged or ridiculed Gideon Vetch, and that person was Gideon Vetch himself.