heme till it was perfect; the fog came as an
unexpected ally to cover his movements. Jealousy, outraged affection,
the desire for revenge, the lust for political power--these were human.
They might pity the criminal, they could not find him innocent of the
crime.
Mr. Justice Crogie, summing up, began dead against the prisoner.
Reviewing the evidence, he pointed out that plausible hypotheses neatly
dove-tailed did not necessarily weaken one another, the fitting so well
together of the whole rather making for the truth of the parts. Besides,
the case for the prosecution was as far from being all hypothesis as the
case for the defense was from excluding hypothesis. The key, the letter,
the reluctance to produce the letter, the heated interview with
Constant, the misstatement about the prisoner's destination, the flight
to Liverpool, the false tale about searching for a "him," the
denunciations of Constant, all these were facts. On the other hand,
there were various lacunae and hypotheses in the case for the defense.
Even conceding the somewhat dubious alibi afforded by the prisoner's
presence at Euston at 5:25 a. m., there was no attempt to account for
his movements between that and 7:15 a. m. It was as possible that he
returned to Bow as that he lingered about Euston. There was nothing in
the medical evidence to make his guilt impossible. Nor was there
anything inherently impossible in Constant's yielding to the sudden
temptation of a beautiful girl, nor in a working-girl deeming herself
deserted, temporarily succumbing to the fascinations of a gentleman and
regretting it bitterly afterward. What had become of the girl was a
mystery. Hers might have been one of those nameless corpses which the
tide swirls up on slimy river banks. The jury must remember, too, that
the relation might not have actually passed into dishonor, it might have
been just grave enough to smite the girl's conscience, and to induce her
to behave as she had done. It was enough that her letter should have
excited the jealousy of the prisoner. There was one other point which he
would like to impress on the jury, and which the counsel for the
prosecution had not sufficiently insisted upon. This was that the
prisoner's guiltiness was the only plausible solution that had ever been
advanced of the Bow Mystery. The medical evidence agreed that Mr.
Constant did not die by his own hand. Someone must therefore have
murdered him. The number of people who could h
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