st
person present. Since it was my hand and none other which must give this
fresh turn to the wheel of justice, it were well for me to do it calmly
and without any of the old maddening throb of heart. But the time seemed
long before Arthur was released from further cross-examination, and the
opportunity given Mr. Moffat to call his next witness.

Something in the attitude he now took, something in the way he bent over
his client and whispered a few admonitory words, and still more the
emotion with which these words were received and answered by some
extraordinary protest, aroused expectation to a still greater pitch, and
made my course seem even more painful to myself than I had foreseen when
dreaming over and weighing the possibilities of this hour. With something
like terror, I awaited the calling of my name; and, when it was delayed,
it was with emotions inexplicable to myself that I looked up and saw Mr.
Moffat holding open a door at the left of the judge, with that attitude
of respect, which a man only assumes in the presence and under the
dominating influence of woman.

"Ella!" thought I. "Instead of saving her by my contemplated sacrifice of
Carmel, I have only added one sacrifice to another."

But when the timid faltering step we could faintly hear crossing the room
beyond, had brought its possessor within sight, and I perceived the tall,
black-robed, heavily veiled woman who reached for Mr. Moffat's sustaining
arm, I did not need the startling picture of the prisoner, standing
upright, with outheld and repellant hands, to realise that the impossible
had happened, and that all which he, as well as I, had done and left
undone, suffered and suppressed, had been in vain.

Mr. Moffat, with no eye for him or for me, conducted his witness to a
chair; then, as she loosened her veil and let it drop in her lap, he
cried in tones which rang from end to end of the court-room: "I summon
Carmel Cumberland to the stand, to witness in her brother's defence."

The surprise was complete. It was a great moment for Mr. Moffat; but for
me all was confusion, dread, a veil of misty darkness, through which
shone her face, marred by its ineffaceable scar, but calm as I had never
expected to see it again in this life, and beautiful with a smile under
which her deeply shaken and hardly conscious brother sank slowly back
into his seat, amid a silence as profound as the hold she had immediately
taken upon all hearts.

XXVIII