here had confronted him face to face. Physically he was improved.
Enough time had elapsed since his sudden dropping of old habits, for him
to have risen above its first effects and to have acquired that tone of
personal dignity which follows a successful issue to any moral conflict.
But otherwise the difference was such as to arouse doubt as to the real
man lurking behind his dogged, uncommunicative manner.

Even with the knowledge of his motives which I believed myself to
possess, I was at a loss to understand his indifference to self and the
immobility of manner he maintained under all circumstances and during
every fluctuation which took place in the presentation of his case, or in
the temper of the people surrounding him. I felt that beyond the one fact
that he could be relied upon to protect Carmel's name and Carmel's
character, even to the jeopardising of his case, he was not to be counted
on, and might yet startle many of us, and most notably of all, the little
woman waiting to hear what he had to say in his own defence before she
threw herself into the breach and made that devoted attempt to save him,
in his own despite, which had been my terror from the first and was my
terror now.

Perjury! but not in his own defence--rather in opposition to it--that is
what his counsel had to fear; and I wondered if they knew it. My
attention became absorbed in the puzzle. Carmel's fate, if not
Ella's--and certainly my own--hung upon the issue. This I knew, and this
I faced, calmly, but very surely, as, the preliminary questions having
been answered, Mr. Moffat proceeded.

The witness's name having been demanded and given and some other
preliminary formalities gone through, he was asked:

"Mr. Cumberland, did you have any quarrel with your sister during the
afternoon or evening of December the second?"

"I did." Then, as if not satisfied with this simple statement, he
blurted forth: "And it wasn't the first. I hated the discipline she
imposed upon me, and the disapproval she showed of my ways and the manner
in which I chose to spend my money."

A straightforward expression of feeling, but hardly a judicious one.

Judge Edwards glanced, in some surprise, from Mr. Moffat to the daring
man who could choose thus to usher in his defence; and then, forgetting
his own emotions, in his instinctive desire for order, rapped sharply
with his gavel in correction of the audible expression of a like feeling
on the part of the expect