l I've turned over the page to make sure
they weren't comparatives. Eh, man, sitting on his bed there at Brighton
and gibbering at me, Sabre was a whole man, a sane man; he was a
fortunate and happy man, compared with this that I saw come at him down
at Tidborough yesterday.

"I've told you that chap that came up to him outside the Law Courts
evidently told him the girl had killed herself and that he was wanted
for the inquest. Next day I went down, knowing nothing about it, of
course. I hit up Tidborough about twelve. No train out to Penny Green
for an hour, so I went to take a fly. Old chap I went to charter, when
he heard it was Sabre's place I was looking for, told me Sabre was at
this inquest; said he'd driven him in to it. And told me what inquest.
Inquest! You can guess how I felt. It was the first I'd heard about it.
Hopped into the cab and drove down to it.

"By Jove, old man.... By Jove, old man, how I'm ever going to tell you.
That poor chap in there baited by those fiends.... By Jove.... By
Jove.... You know, old man, I've told you before, I'm not the sort of
chap that weeps, he knows not why; I never nursed a tame gazelle and
all that sort of thing. I can sit through a play thinking about my
supper while my wife ruins her dress and my trousers crying over
them--but this business, old Sabre up in that witness box with his face
in a knot and stammering out 'Look here--. Look here--'; that was
absolutely all he ever said; he never could get any farther--old Sabre
going through that, and the solicitor tearing the inside out of him and
throwing it in his face, and that treble-dyed Iscariot Twyning prompting
the solicitor and egging him on, with his beastly spittle running like
venom out of the corners of his mouth--I tell you my eyes felt like two
boiled gooseberries in my head: boiled red hot; and a red-hot potato
stuck in my throat, stuck tight. I tell you....

"When I crept into that infernal court, that infernal torture chamber,
they were just finishing the case of the child. This solicitor
chap--chap with a humped back and a head as big as a house--was just
finishing fawning round a doctor man in the box, putting it up to him
that there was nothing to suggest deliberate suffocation of the baby.
Oxalic acid poisoning--was it not the case that the girl would have died
in great agony? Writhed on the bed? Might easily have overlaid the
child? The doctor had seen the position in which she was found lying in
r