He turned to the sergeant and asked: "Have you made any
inquiries as to the movements of the accused on the night of the
murder?"

"I have," replied the sergeant, "and I find that, on that night, the
accused was alone in the house, his housekeeper having gone over to
Eastwich. Two men saw him in the town about ten o'clock, apparently
walking in the direction of Sundersley."

This concluded the sergeant's evidence, and when one or two more
witnesses had been examined without eliciting any fresh facts, the
coroner briefly recapitulated the evidence, and requested the jury to
consider their verdict. Thereupon a solemn hush fell upon the court,
broken only by the whispers of the jurymen, as they consulted together;
and the spectators gazed in awed expectancy from the accused to the
whispering jury. I glanced at Draper, sitting huddled in his chair, his
clammy face as pale as that of the corpse in the mortuary hard by, his
hands tremulous and restless; and, scoundrel as I believed him to be, I
could not but pity the abject misery that was written large all over
him, from his damp hair to his incessantly shifting feet.

The jury took but a short time to consider their verdict. At the end of
five minutes the foreman announced that they were agreed, and, in answer
to the coroner's formal inquiry, stood up and replied:

"We find that the deceased met his death by being stabbed in the chest
by the accused man, Alfred Draper."

"That is a verdict of wilful murder," said the coroner, and he entered
it accordingly in his notes. The Court now rose. The spectators
reluctantly trooped out, the jurymen stood up and stretched themselves,
and the two constables, under the guidance of the sergeant, carried the
wretched Draper in a fainting condition to a closed fly that was waiting
outside.

"I was not greatly impressed by the activity of the defence," I remarked
maliciously as we walked home.

Thorndyke smiled. "You surely did not expect me to cast my pearls of
forensic learning before a coroner's jury," said he.

"I expected that you would have something to say on behalf of your
client," I replied. "As it was, his accusers had it all their own way."

"And why not?" he asked. "Of what concern to us is the verdict of the
coroner's jury?"

"It would have seemed more decent to make some sort of defence," I
replied.

"My dear Jervis," he rejoined, "you do not seem to appreciate the great
virtue of what Lord Beaconsfield so feli