f Paradise, a
young saint in purity and singleness of heart, in comparison with those
other women.

Bah! what a besotted idiot he had been! She was as they were. The nodding
of their towering hats was before his eyes; the subdued titter that
accompanied their whispered comments was in his ears; the lavender, white
rose, and violet essences with which they perfumed their baths and
sprinkled their clothes were in his nostrils; suffocatingly, as his
Counsel went on pleading. The intention of his trenchant cross-questioning
of Bough, who had lied from the beginning, like a true son of the Devil,
his father, showed plainly now. Little by little the evidence accumulated.

Here, free and unsuspect and doing his best to send another man to Penal
Servitude, was the man who had all to gain by fixing the guilt upon the
Accused. He had sent the woman, his mistress, to the prisoner; he had
resented the prisoner's refusal to commit or to abet a dangerous and
illegal operation. He had compelled his hapless victim to submit herself
to the hands of a wretch who lived by such deeds. Possibly he had sickened
of his poor toy--he had told her as much. Possibly he had determined, by a
bold and daring stroke, to free himself of a wearisome burden, and let
another man pay the penalty for his own crime. The substitution of the
lethal drug found in the bottle for the harmless bromide mixture given to
Mrs. Bough by Dr. Saxham would naturally suggest itself to such a wretch,
whose calculating cleverness had been crowned with success by the
culminating masterstroke, admirable in its simplicity, damnable in its
fiendish cunning, of sending the unhappy woman whose deliberate murder he
had really planned and carried out, to die upon the threshold of the
innocent victim of this diabolical plot. Let those who heard hesitate
before they played into the hands of a villain by condemning the blameless
to suffer! Let them look at the young man before them, whose hard work had
won him, early in life, his brilliant position as one of the recognised
pioneers of the new School of Surgery, as an admitted authority on
Clinical Medicine, whose wedding-bells--the handkerchiefs came out at
this--had rung to-morrow but for this harrowing and bitter stroke of
adverse Destiny. Which would they have? Let the Jury decide for Christ or
Barabbas! He spoke in all reverence, because the upright, innocent,
charitable, self-denying life of a diligent healer of men would support