aling to the
judge; but it rarely failed that the stronger side, which was that of
the prosecution, won the day. The imperious accuser, whose resources of
precedent and argument seemed boundless, carried everything with a
high hand. The boy, of course, was not aware of the weakness of the
representative of the majesty of the law, nor the inferiority, in force
and skill, of the defence; but he gradually came to a practical
perception of how the matter stood.

Philip listened with growing interest, sometimes amused, sometimes
indignant, as the remorseless prosecutor ploughed his way through the
witnesses, whom he bullied into admissions that they were certain of
nothing, and that in the dusk of that far-off evening, the man whom they
had sworn at the time to be quite unlike him, might in reality have been
Brown. Philip got greatly interested in this question. He took up the
opposite side himself with much heat, feeling as sure as if he had been
there that it was not Brown: and he was delighted in his excitement,
when there stood up one man who would not be bullied, a man who had the
air of a respectable clerk of the lower class, and who held his own. He
had been an office boy, the son apparently of the housekeeper in charge
of the premises referred to when the incident occurred, and the gist of
his evidence was that the prisoner at the bar--so awful a personage once
to the little office boy, so curtly discussed now as Brown--had left the
office at four o'clock in the afternoon of the 6th of September, and had
not appeared again.

"A different gentleman altogether came in the evening, a much taller
man, with a large moustache."

"Where was it that you saw this man?"

"Slipping in at the side door of the office as if he didn't want to be
seen."

"Was that a door which was generally open, or used by the public?"

"Never, sir; but none of the doors were used at that time of night."

"And how, then, could any one get admittance there?"

"Only those that had private keys; the directors had their private
keys."

"Then your conclusion was that it was a director, and that he had a
right to be there?"

"I knew it was a director, sir, because I knew the gentleman," the
witness said.

"You say it was late in the evening of the 6th of September. Was it
daylight at the time?"

"Oh, no, sir; nearly dark--a sort of a half light."

"Did the person you saw go in openly, or make any attempt at concealment?"

"He had a lig