prisoner, without leaving their box. It was not too much to say that his
life had been saved by his brother. His brother alone had persisted, from
first to last, in obstinately disbelieving the clock--for no better
reason than that the clock was the witness which asserted the prisoner's
guilt! He had worried everybody with incessant inquiries--he had
discovered the absence of the housemaid, after the trial had begun--and
he had started off to interrogate the girl, knowing nothing, and
suspecting nothing; simply determined to persist in the one everlasting
question with which he persecuted everybody belonging to the house: "The
clock is going to hang my brother; can you tell me anything about the
clock?"

Four months later, the mystery of the crime was cleared up. One of the
disreputable companions of the murdered man confessed on his death-bed
that he had done the deed. There was nothing interesting or remarkable in
the circumstances. Chance which had put innocence in peril, had offered
impunity to guilt. An infamous woman; a jealous quarrel; and an absence
at the moment of witnesses on the spot--these were really the commonplace
materials which had composed the tragedy of Pardon's Piece.

CHAPTER THE NINTH

The Hero of the Trial

"You have forced it out of me. Now you have had your way, never mind my
feelings--Go!"

Those were the first words the Hero of the Trial said to me, when he was
able to speak again! He withdrew with a curious sullen resignation to the
farther end of the room. There he stood looking at me, as a man might
have looked who carried some contagion about him, and who wished to
preserve a healthy fellow-creature from the peril of touching him.

"Why should I go?" I asked.

"You are a bold woman," he said, "to remain in the same room with a man
who has been pointed at as a murderer, and who has been tried for his
life."

The same unhealthy state of mind which had brought him to Dimchurch, and
which had led him to speak to me as he had spoken on the previous
evening, was, as I understood it, now irritating him against me as a
person who had made his own quick temper the means of entrapping him into
letting out the truth. How was I to deal with a man in this condition? I
decided to perform the feat which you call in England, "taking the bull
by the horns."

"I see but one man here," I said. "A man honorably acquitted of a crime
which he was incapable of committing. A man who deserves my in