enery, came to stare at Harry, and, having seen her, returned to
Cross Key with marvelous stories of her charms. As the time drew on the
applications for admittance to the court-house made the life of the
under-sheriff a burden, and caused the hearts of his subordinates (who
got the half-crowns) to sing for joy.

The unhappy Richard was wholly ignorant of all this excitement. When he
pictured the court-house to himself, as he often did, he only beheld a
crowd of indifferent persons, who would pay no more attention to his own
case than to that of Balfour, or any other that might follow or precede
it. He saw himself taken out in custody, and carried in some conveyance,
such as he had arrived in, through the gaping street; but the idea of
that ordeal gave him no uneasiness. Those who saw him would forget him
the next moment, or confuse him with some other in the same wretched
plight. His mind always reverted from such reflections, as comparatively
trivial, to the issue of the trial itself. Indeed, that thought might be
said to be constant, though others intruded on it occasionally without
obscuring it, like light clouds that cross the moon. As to the details
of the scene of which he was about to be so prominent an actor, he knew
nothing; for the warders never opened their lips to him, except
officially, and Mr. Balfour had never happened to come to grief in the
course of his professional practice in that particular locality before.

But the fact was that the jail of Cross Key, though situated in so
out-of-the-way a spot, was a model establishment in its way, and built
upon the very highest principles of architecture, as connected with the
administration of the criminal law. No prisoner was ever taken out of it
for trial at all, but was conducted by an underground passage into the
court-house itself--indeed, into the very heart of it, for a flight of
steps, with a trap-door at the top, led straight into the dock, in which
he made his appearance like a Jack-in-the-box, but much more to his own
astonishment than to that of the spectators.

Imagine the unhappy Richard thus confronted, wholly unexpectedly, with a
thousand eager eyes! They devoured him on the right hand and on the
left, before him and behind him; they looked down upon him from the
galleries above with a hunger that was increased by distance. Even the
barristers in the space between him and the judge turned round to gaze
at him, and the judge himself adjusted hi