inted irresistibly in one and the same direction; and
Mrs. Waldron was committed for trial, on the charge of murdering her
husband by poison. A solicitor in first-rate criminal practice was
sent for from London to get up the prisoner's defense, and these
'Instructions' took their form and shape accordingly.--What's the
matter? What do you want now?"

Suddenly rising from his chair, Mr. Bashwood stretched across the table,
and tried to take the papers from his son. "I want to look at them," he
burst out, eagerly. "I want to see what they say about the captain from
Cuba. He was at the bottom of it, Jemmy--I'll swear he was at the bottom
of it!"

"Nobody doubted that who was in the secret of the case at the time,"
rejoined his son. "But nobody could prove it. Sit down again, dad, and
compose yourself. There's nothing here about Captain Manuel but the
lawyer's private suspicions of him, for the counsel to act on or not, at
the counsel's discretion. From first to last she persisted in screening
the captain. At the outset of the business she volunteered two
statements to the lawyer--both of which he suspected to be false. In the
first place she declared that she was innocent of the crime. He wasn't
surprised, of course, so far; his clients were, as a general rule,
in the habit of deceiving him in that way. In the second place, while
admitting her private correspondence with the Cuban captain, she
declared that the letters on both sides related solely to a proposed
elopement, to which her husband's barbarous treatment had induced her to
consent. The lawyer naturally asked to see the letters. 'He has burned
all my letters, and I have burned all his,' was the only answer he
got. It was quite possible that Captain Manuel might have burned _her_
letters when he heard there was a coroner's inquest in the house. But it
was in her solicitor's experience (as it is in my experience too) that,
when a woman is fond of a man, in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred,
risk or no risk, she keeps his letters. Having his suspicions roused
in this way, the lawyer privately made some inquiries about the foreign
captain, and found that he was as short of money as a foreign captain
could be. At the same time, he put some questions to his client about
her expectations from her deceased husband. She answered, in high
indignation, that a will had been found among her husband's papers,
privately executed only a few days before his death, and leaving he