liar faces, within a few feet of the heavily
veiled prisoner in the dock, and not many more from the red-robed judge
upon the bench.

The first to take all this trouble on the Monday morning, and the last
to escape from the foul air (shot by biting draughts) when the court
adjourned, was a white-headed gentleman of striking appearance and
stamina to match; for, undeterred by the experience, he was in like
manner first and last upon each subsequent day. Behind him came and went
the well-known faces, the authors and the actors with a
semi-professional interest in the case; but they were not well known to
the gentleman with the white head. He heard no more than he could help
of their constant whisperings, and, if he knew not at whom he more than
once had occasion to turn and frown, he certainly did not look the man
to care. He had a well-preserved reddish face, with a small mouth of
extraordinary strength, a canine jaw, and singularly noble forehead; but
his most obvious distinction was his full head of snowy hair. The only
hair upon his face, a pair of bushy eyebrows, was so much darker as to
suggest a dye; but the eyes themselves were black as midnight, with a
glint of midnight stars, and of such a subtle inscrutability that a
certain sweetness of expression came only as the last surprise in a face
full of contrast and contradiction.

No one in court had ever seen this man before; no one but the Under
Sheriff learnt his name during the week; but by the third day his
identity was a subject of discussion, both by the professional students
of the human countenance, who sat behind him (balked of their study by
the prisoner's veil), and among the various functionaries who had
already found him as free with a sovereign as most gentlemen are with a
piece of silver. So every day he was ushered with ceremony to the same
place, at the inner end of the lowest row; there he would sit watching
the prisoner, a trifle nearer her than those beside or behind him; and
only once was his attentive serenity broken for an instant by a change
of expression due to any development of the case.

It was not when the prisoner pleaded clearly through her veil, in the
first breathless minutes of all; it was not a little later, when the
urbane counsel for the prosecution, wagging his pince-nez at the jury,
thrilled every other hearer with a mellifluous forecast of the new
evidence to be laid before them. The missing watch and chain had been
found;