do?"

"From here, my lord."

Seeing him now full face, and, as it might be, come to life in the effort
to convey his feelings, Mr. Bosengate had suddenly a quite different
impression of the fellow. It was as if his khaki had fallen off, and he
had stepped out of his own shadow, a live and quivering creature. His
pinched clean-shaven face seemed to have an irregular, wilder, hairier
look, his large nervous brown eyes darkened and glowed; he jerked his
shoulders, his arms, his whole body, like a man suddenly freed from cramp
or a suit of armour.

He spoke, too, in a quick, crisp, rather high voice, pinching his
consonants a little, sharpening his vowels, like a true Welshman.

"My lord and misters the jury," he said: "I was a hairdresser when the
call came on me to join the army. I had a little home and a wife. I
never thought what it would be like to be away from them, I surely never
did; and I'm ashamed to be speaking it out like this--how it can squeeze
and squeeze a man, how it can prey on your mind, when you're nervous like
I am. 'Tis not everyone that cares for his home--there's lots o' them
never wants to see their wives again. But for me 'tis like being shut up
in a cage, it is!" Mr. Bosengate saw daylight between the skinny fingers
of the man's hand thrown out with a jerk. "I cannot bear it shut up away
from wife and home like what you are in the army. So when I took my
razor that morning I was wild--an' I wouldn't be here now but for that
man catching my hand. There was no reason in it, I'm willing to confess.
It was foolish; but wait till you get feeling like what I was, and see
how it draws you. Misters the jury, don't send me back to prison; it is
worse still there. If you have wives you will know what it is like for
lots of us; only some is more nervous than others. I swear to you, sirs,
I could not help it---?" Again the little man flung out his hand, his
whole thin body shook and Mr. Bosengate felt the same sensation as when
he drove his car over a dog--"Misters the jury, I hope you may never in
your lives feel as I've been feeling."

The little man ceased, his eyes shrank back into their sockets, his
figure back into its mask of shadowy brown and gleaming buttons, and Mr.
Bosengate was conscious that the judge was making a series of remarks;
and, very soon, of being seated at a mahogany table in the jury's
withdrawing room, hearing the, voice of the man with hair like an Irish
terrier's