The gift of flowing persuasive speech which was naturally hers, which the agitations, the debates of these weeks had been maturing, came to her call.

She leant forward and took up the petition.

One by one she went through its pleas, adding to them here and there from her own knowledge of Hurd and his peasant's life--presenting it all clearly, with great intellectual force, but in an atmosphere of emotion, of high pity, charged throughout with the "tears of things." To her, gradually, unconsciously, the whole matter--so sordid, commonplace, brutal in Lord Maxwell's eyes!--had become a tragic poem, a thing of fear and pity, to which her whole being vibrated.

And as she conceived it, so she reproduced it.

Wharton's points were there indeed, but so were Hurd's poverty, Hurd's deformity, Hurd as the boyish victim of a tyrant's insults, the miserable wife, the branded children--emphasised, all of them, by the occasional quiver, quickly steadied again, of the girl's voice.
Lord Maxwell sat by his writing-table, his head resting on his hand, one knee crossed over the other.