left the table and was shut up in my own room. I could
not rest till I had fathomed my own mind in regard to the events of the
day.

The question--the great question, of course, now--was how much of
Howard's testimony was to be believed, and whether he was,
notwithstanding his asseverations to the contrary, the murderer of his
wife. To most persons the answer seemed easy. From the expression of
such people as I had jostled in leaving the court-room, I judged that
his sentence had already been passed in the minds of most there present.
But these hasty judgments did not influence me. I hope I look deeper
than the surface, and my mind would not subscribe to his guilt,
notwithstanding the bad impression made upon me by his falsehoods and
contradictions.

Now why would not my mind subscribe to it? Had sentiment got the better
of me, Amelia Butterworth, and was I no longer capable of looking a
thing squarely in the face? Had the Van Burnams, of all people in the
world, awakened my sympathies at the cost of my good sense, and was I
disposed to see virtue in a man in whom every circumstance as it came to
light revealed little but folly and weakness? The lies he had told--for
there is no other word to describe his contradictions--would have been
sufficient under most circumstances to condemn a man in my estimation.
Why, then, did I secretly look for excuses to his conduct?

Probing the matter to the bottom, I reasoned in this way: The latter
half of his evidence was a complete contradiction of the first,
purposely so. In the first, he made himself out a cold-hearted egotist
with not enough interest in his wife to make an effort to determine
whether she and the murdered woman were identical; in the latter, he
showed himself in the light of a man influenced to the point of folly by
a woman to whom he had been utterly unyielding a few hours before.

Now, knowing human nature to be full of contradictions, I could not
satisfy myself that I should be justified in accepting either half of
his testimony as absolutely true. The man who is all firmness one minute
may be all weakness the next, and in face of the calm assertions made by
this one when driven to bay by the unexpected discoveries of the police,
I dared not decide that his final assurances were altogether false, and
that he was not the man I had seen enter the adjoining house with his
wife.

Why, then, not carry the conclusion farther and admit, as reason and
probability