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. At
first sight, the Governor appeared merely ordinary--a tall, rugged
figure, built of good bone and muscle and sound to the core, with the
look of arrested energy which was doubtless an inheritance from the
circus ring. There was nothing impressive about him; nothing that would
cause one to turn and look back in a crowd. What struck one most was his
air of extraordinary freshness and health, of sanguine vitality. His
face was well-coloured and irregular in outline, with a high bulging
forehead and thick sandy hair which was already gray on the temples. In
the shadow his eyes did not appear remarkably fine; they seemed at the
first glance to be of an indeterminate colour--was it blue or gray?--and
there was nothing striking in their deep setting under the beetling
sandy eyebrows. All this was true; and yet while Stephen looked into
them over the Governor's outstretched hand, he told himself that they
were the most human eyes he had ever seen. Afterward, when he groped
through his vocabulary for a more accurate description, he could not
find one. There was shrewdness in Gideon Vetch's eyes; there was
friendliness; there was the blue sparkle of contagious humour--a ripple
of light that was like visible laughter--but above all there was
humanity. Though Stephen did not try to grasp the vivid impressions that
passed through his mind, he felt intuitively that he had learned to know
Gideon Vetch through his look and manner as well as he should have known
another man after weeks or months of daily intercourse. Whatever the