ed, her eyes were fixed steadily, wonderingly upon him.
There was a question in her gaze, which never in the course of the
speech was quite absorbed by the admiration--the intense admiration--she
was feeling for him. Once as he turned with a concentrated earnestness
in her direction his eyes met hers. The message he flashed her was
sub-conscious, for his mind never wavered an instant from the cause in
hand, but it said to her:

"When this is over, Kathleen, I will come to you." For another quarter
of an hour he exposed the fallacy of purely circumstantial evidence;
he raised in the minds of his hearers the painful responsibility of the
law, the awful tyranny of miscarriage of justice; he condemned prejudice
against a prisoner because that prisoner demanded that the law should
prove him guilty instead of his proving himself innocent. If a man chose
to stand to that, to sternly assume this perilous position, the law had
no right to take advantage of it. He turned towards the prisoner and
traced his possible history: as the sensitive, intelligent son of godly
Catholic parents from some remote parish in French Canada. He drew an
imaginary picture of the home from which he might have come, and of the
parents and brothers and sisters who would have lived weeks of torture
knowing that their son and brother was being tried for his life. It
might at first glance seem quixotic, eccentric, but was it unnatural
that the prisoner should choose silence as to his origin and home,
rather than have his family and friends face the undoubted peril
lying before him? Besides, though his past life might have been wholly
blameless, it would not be evidence in his favour. It might, indeed,
if it had not been blameless, provide some element of unjust suspicion
against him, furnish some fancied motive. The prisoner had chosen his
path, and events had so far justified him. It must be clear to the
minds of judge and jury that there were fatally weak places in the
circumstantial evidence offered for the conviction of this man.

There was the fact that no sign of the crime, no drop of blood, no
weapon, was found about him or near him, and that he was peacefully
sleeping at the moment the constable arrested him.

There was also the fact that no motive for the crime had been shown. It
was not enough that he and the dead man had been heard quarrelling. Was
there any certainty that it was a quarrel, since no word or sentence
of the conversation had be