r's guilt. Life and honor
are sweet even to one in her condition; and if her lover could be saved
without falsehood it was her natural instinct to avoid it.

"And it looked as if he would be saved. A defence both skilful and
ingenious had been advanced for him by his counsel--a defence which only
the one fact so securely locked in her bosom could controvert. You can
imagine, then, the horror and alarm which must have seized her when, in
the very hour of hope, you approached her with the demand which proved
that her confidence in her power to keep silence had been premature, and
that the alternative was yet to be submitted to her of destroying her
lover or sacrificing herself. Yet, because a great nature does not
succumb without a struggle, she tried even now the effect of the truth
upon you, and told you the one fact she considered so detrimental to the
safety of her lover.

"The result was fatal. Though I cannot presume to say what passed
between you, I can imagine how the change in your countenance warned her
of the doom she would bring upon Mansell if she went into court with the
same story she told you. Nor do I find it difficult to imagine how, in
one of her history and temperament, a night of continuous brooding over
this one topic should have culminated in the act which startled us so
profoundly in the court-room this morning. Love, misery, devotion are
not mere names to her, and the greatness which sustained her through the
ordeal of denouncing her lover in order that an innocent man might be
relieved from suspicion, was the same that made it possible for her to
denounce herself that she might redeem the life she had thus
deliberately jeopardized.

"That she did this with a certain calmness and dignity proves it to have
been the result of design. A murderess forced by conscience into
confession would not have gone into the details of her crime, but
blurted out her guilt, and left the details to be drawn from her by
question. Only the woman anxious to tell her story with the plausibility
necessary to insure its belief would have planned and carried on her
confession as she did.

"The action of the prisoner, in face of this proof of devotion, though
it might have been foreseen by a man, was evidently not foreseen by her.
To me, who watched her closely at the time, her face wore a strange look
of mingled satisfaction and despair,--satisfaction in having awakened
his manhood, despair at having failed in saving h