judiced nurse, Christina Ormsay,
has said of the deceased lady. From my own personal observation,
I contradict every word of it. Mrs. Eustace Macallan--granting her
personal defects--was nevertheless one of the most charming women I ever
met with. She was highly bred, in the best sense of the word. I never
saw in any other person so sweet a smile as hers, or such grace and
beauty of movement as hers. If you liked music, she sang beautifully;
and few professed musicians had such a touch on the piano as hers. If
you preferred talking, I never yet met with the man (or even the woman,
which is saying a great deal more) whom her conversation could not
charm. To say that such a wife as this could be first cruelly neglected,
and then barbarously murdered, by the man--no! by the martyr--who stands
there, is to tell me that the sun never shines at noonday, or that the
heaven is not above the earth.

"Oh yes! I know that the letters of her friends show that she wrote to
them in bitter complaint of her husband's conduct to her. But remember
what one of those friends (the wisest and the best of them) says in
reply. 'I own to thinking,' she writes, 'that your sensitive nature
exaggerates or misinterprets the neglect that you experience at the
hands of your husband.' There, in that one sentence, is the whole truth!
Mrs. Eustace Macallan's nature was the imaginative, self-tormenting
nature of a poet. No mortal love could ever have been refined enough for
_her._ Trifles which women of a coarser moral fiber would have passed
over without notice, were causes of downright agony to that exquisitely
sensitive temperament. There are persons born to be unhappy. That poor
lady was one of them. When I have said this, I have said all.

"No! There is one word more still to be added.

"It may be as well to remind the prosecution that Mrs. Eustace
Macallan's death was in the pecuniary sense a serious loss to her
husband. He had insisted on having the whole of her fortune settled on
herself, and on her relatives after her, when he married. Her income
from that fortune helped to keep in splendor the house and grounds
at Gleninch. The prisoner's own resources (aided even by his mother's
jointure) were quite inadequate fitly to defray the expenses of living
at his splendid country-seat. Knowing all the circumstances, I can
positively assert that the wife's death has deprived the husband of
two-thirds of his income. And the prosecution, viewing him as