not surprising that popular interest, nourished by an
indefatigable and excessively enterprising press, should have mounted
till no one would have believed that it could mount any more. But the
evasion from Werter Road on that June morning intensified the interest
enormously. Of course, owing to the drawn blinds, it soon became known,
and the bloodhounds of the Sunday papers were sniffing along the
platforms of all the termini in London. Priam's departure greatly
prejudiced the cause of Mr. Oxford, especially when the bloodhounds
failed and Priam persisted in his invisibility. If a man was an honest
man, why should he flee the public gaze, and in the night? There was but
a step from the posing of this question to the inevitable inference that
Mr. Oxford's line of defence was really too fantastic for credence.
Certainly organs of vast circulation, while repeating that, as the
action was _sub judice_, they could say nothing about it, had already
tried the action several times in their impartial columns, and they now
tried it again, with the entire public as jury. And in three days Priam
had definitely become a criminal in the public eye, a criminal flying
from justice. Useless to assert that he was simply a witness subpoenaed
to give evidence at the trial! He had transgressed the unwritten law of
the English constitution that a person prominent in a _cause celebre_
belongs for the time being, not to himself, but to the nation at large.
He had no claim to privacy. In surreptitiously obtaining seclusion he
was merely robbing the public and the public's press of their
inalienable right.

Who could deny now the reiterated statement that _he_ was a bigamist?

It came to be said that he must be on his way to South America. Then the
public read avidly articles by specially retained barristers on the
extradition treaties with Brazil, Argentina, Ecuador, Chili, Paraguay
and Uruguay.

The curates Matthew and Henry preached to crowded congregations at
Putney and Bermondsey, and were reported verbatim in the _Christian
Voice Sermon Supplement_, and other messengers of light.

And gradually the nose of England bent closer and closer to its
newspaper of a morning. And coffee went cold, and bacon fat congealed,
from the Isle of Wight to Hexham, while the latest rumours were being
swallowed. It promised to be stupendous, did the case of Witt _v_.
Parfitts. It promised to be one of those cases that alone make life
worth living, that