ng
nose, slightly flattened temples, faintly cynical and ironic lips
and small but obstinate chin, was almost sinister in its complete
immobility.

"He's certainly a corrupt beast," Dion said to himself. "But as
certainly he's an interesting, clever, knowledgeable beast."

Dumeny's very thick, glossy, and slightly undulating dark hair, growing
closely round his low forehead, helped to make him almost romantically
handsome, although his features were rather irregular. His white ears
were abnormally small, Dion noticed.

The Judge went with cold minuteness into every detail of Dumeny's
intimacy with Mrs. Clarke that had been revealed in the trial, and dwelt
on the link of music which, it was said, had held them together.

"Music stimulates the passions, and may, in highly sensitive persons,
generate impulses not easy to control, provided that the situation
in which such persons find themselves, when roused and stirred,
is propitious. It has been given in evidence that Monsieur Dumeny
frequently played and sang to the respondent till late in the night in
the pavilion which has been described to you. You have seen Monsieur
Dumeny in the box, and can judge for yourselves whether he was a man
likely to avail himself of any advantage his undoubted talents may have
given him with a highly artistic and musical woman."

There was nothing striking in the words, but to Dion the Judge's voice
seemed slightly changed as it uttered the last sentence. Surely a frigid
severity had crept into it, surely it was colored with a faint, but
definite, contempt. Several of the jury started narrowly at Aristide
Dumeny, and the foreman, with a care and precision almost ostentatious,
took a note.

The Judge continued his analysis of Mrs. Clarke's intimacy with Dumeny.
He was scrupulously fair; he gave full weight to the mutual attraction
which may be born out of common intellectual tastes--an attraction
possibly quite innocent, quite free from desire of anything but food for
the brain, the subtler emotions, and the soul "if you like to call
it so, gentlemen." But, somehow, he left upon the mind of Dion, and
probably upon the minds of many others, an impression that he, the
Judge, was doubtful as to the sheer intellectuality of Monsieur Dumeny,
was not convinced that he had reached that condition of moral serenity
and purification in which a rare woman can be happily regarded as a sort
of disembodied spirit.

When the Judge at length finis