As it was, they involved either hypocrisy or ungenerous irony at the expense of his questioner.
Buckland could not but understand them in the latter sense; his face darkened.

At that moment, Peak met his eye, and encountered its steady searching gaze with a perfectly calm smile.

Half-a-dozen pulsings of his heart--violent, painful, and the fatal hour of his life had struck.
'What had he to say about it ?' Buckland asked, carelessly.
Peak's reply was one of those remarkable efforts of mind--one might say, of character--which are sometimes called forth, without premeditation, almost without consciousness, by a profound moral crisis.

A minute or two ago he would have believed it impossible to recall and state in lucid terms the arguments to which, as he sat in the Cathedral, he had barely given ear; he remembered vaguely that the preacher (whose name he knew not till now) had dwelt for a few moments on the topic indicated, but at the time he was indisposed to listen seriously, and what chance was there that the chain of thought had fixed itself in his memory?
Now, under the marvelling regard of his conscious self, he poured forth an admirable rendering of the Canon's views, fuller than the original--more eloquent, more subtle.

For five minutes he held his hearers in absorbed attention, even Buckland bending forward with an air of genuine interest; and when he stopped, rather suddenly, there followed a silence.
'Mr.Peak,' said the host, after a cough of apology, 'you have made that clearer to me than it was yesterday.