n no better.

"May it please your Honour, and gentlemen of the jury, I am done."

If any one at that moment felt the arrow of death descending into his
heart, it was not Arthur Cumberland.

XXXIV

"STEADY!"

I am a tainted wether of the flock,
Meetest for death; the weakest kind of fruit
Drops earliest to the ground, and so let me.
You cannot better be employ'd, Bassanio,
Than to live still, and write my epitaph.

_Merchant of Venice_.

Why linger over the result. Arthur Cumberland's case was won before Mr.
Fox arose to his feet. The usual routine was gone through. The district
attorney made the most of the three facts which he declared inconsistent
with the prisoner's innocence, just as Mr. Moffat said he would; but the
life was gone from his work, and the result was necessarily
unsatisfactory.

The judge's charge was short, but studiously impartial. When the jury
filed out, I said to myself, "They will return in fifteen minutes." They
returned in ten, with a verdict of acquittal.

The demonstrations of joy which followed filled my ears, and doubtless
left their impression upon my other senses; but my mind took in nothing
but the apparition of my own form taking his place at the bar, under
circumstances less favourable to acquittal than those which had
exonerated him. It was a picture which set my brain whirling. A phantom
judge, a phantom jury, a phantom circle of faces, lacking the
consideration and confidence of those I saw before me; but not a phantom
prisoner, or any mere dream of outrageous shame and suffering.

That shame and that suffering had already seized hold of me. With the
relief of young Arthur's acquittal my faculties had cleared to the
desperate position in which this very acquittal had placed me.

I saw, as never before, how the testimony which had reinstated Carmel in
my heart and won for her and through her the sympathies of the whole
people, had overthrown every specious reason which I and those interested
in me had been able to advance in contradiction of the natural conclusion
to be drawn from the damning fact of my having been seen with my fingers
on Adelaide's throat.

Mr. Moffat's words rang in my ears: "Some one entered that room; some one
stilled the fluttering life still remaining in that feeble breast; but
that some one was not her brother. You must look further for the guilty
perpetrator of this most inhuman act; some one who had not been a witness
to the scene pr