ence
of insanity is not likely to be successful. Personally, I shall go no
further in the case, but I cannot give up my original opinion that the
whole of the facts in this case have not been brought to light. Probably
they never will be--now."

CHAPTER XV

Although no hint of the defence was supposed to transpire, the magic
words "No precedent" were whispered about in legal circles as the day
for Penreath's trial approached, and invested the case with more than
ordinary interest in professional eyes. Editors of London legal journals
endeavoured to extract something definite from Mr. Oakham when he
returned to London to brief counsel and prepare the defence, but the
lunches they lavished on him in pursuit of information might have been
spent with equal profit on the Sphinx.

The editors had to content themselves with sending shorthand writers to
Norwich to report the case fully for the benefit of their circle of
readers, whose appetite for a legal quibble was never satiated by
repetition.

On the other hand, the case aroused but languid interest in the breasts
of the ordinary public. The newspapers had not given the story of the
murder much prominence in their columns, because murders were only good
copy in war-time in the slack season between military offensives, and,
moreover, this particular case lacked the essentials of what modern
editors call, in American journalese jargon, "a good feature story." In
other words, it was not sufficiently sensational or immoral to appeal to
the palates of newspaper readers. It lacked the spectacular elements of
a filmed drama; there was no woman in the case or unwritten law.

It was true that the revelation of the identity of the accused man had
aroused a passing interest in the case, bringing it up from paragraph
value on the back page to a "two-heading item" on the "splash" page, but
that interest soon died away, for, after all, the son of a Berkshire
baronet was small beer in war's levelling days, when peers worked in
overalls in munition factories, and personages of even more exalted rank
sold pennyworths of ham in East-end communal kitchens.

Nevertheless, because of the perennial interest which attaches to all
murder trials, the Norwich Assizes Court was filled with spectators on
the dull drizzling November day when the case was heard, and the fact
that the accused was young and good-looking and of gentle birth probably
accounted for the sprinkling of well-dressed