sure directed towards his questioner, and a
certain additional hardness in his reply, when he finally made it.

"I was her brother. I had a brother's antipathies and rightful
suspicions. I could not see how that ring came to be where it was, when
the only one interested in its restoration was in prison."

This was a direct blow at myself, and of course called Mr. Fox to his
feet, with a motion to strike out this answer. An altercation followed
between him and Mr. Moffat, which, deeply as it involved my life and
reputation, failed to impress me, as it might otherwise have done, if my
whole mind had not been engaged in reconciling the difficulty about this
ring with what I knew of Carmel and the probability which existed of her
having been responsible for its removal from her sister's hand. But
Carmel had been ill since, desperately ill and unconscious. She could
have had nothing to do with its disposal afterwards among the flowers at
her sister's funeral. Nor had she been in a condition to delegate this
act of concealment to another. Who, then, had been the intermediary in
this business? The question was no longer a latent one in my mind; it was
an insistent one, compelling me either to discredit Arthur's explanation
(in which case anything might be believed of him) or to accept for good
and all this new theory that some person of unknown identity had played
an accessory's part in this crime, whose full burden I had hitherto laid
upon the shoulders of the impetuous Carmel. Either hypothesis brought
light. I began to breathe again the air of hope, and if observed at that
moment, must have presented the odd spectacle of a man rejoicing in his
own shame and accepting with positive uplift, the inevitable stigma cast
upon his honour by the suggestive sentence just hurled at him by an
indignant witness.

The point raised by the district attorney having been ruled upon and
sustained by the court, Mr. Moffat made no effort to carry his inquiries
any further in the direction indicated; but I could see, with all my
inexperience of the law and the ways of attorneys before a jury, that
the episode had produced its inevitable result, and that my position, as
a man released from suspicion, had received a shock, the results of which
I might yet be made to feel.

A moment's pause followed, during which some of Mr. Moffat's nervousness
returned. He eyed the prisoner doubtfully, found him stoical and as
self-contained as at the beginni