every case which is tried before a jury there are two questions to
be decided. The first is whether the evidence produced by the
plaintiff alone is sufficient in point of law to justify a verdict.
The second is whether the balance of evidence at the end of the trial
is in favour of the plaintiff or the defendant.

The first of these questions is for the judge, the second for the
jury. From the verdict of the jury there is, strictly speaking, no
appeal. From the decision of the judge an appeal may be carried right
up to the House of Lords.

But in criminal cases, where the Queen is treated as plaintiff, there
was anciently no such method of reviewing the judge's decision. Now a
special court has been established, embracing all the common law
judges of the High Court, who sit in a body to decide these questions.
It was to this tribunal that Tressamer had intended to resort.

But though the prisoner's legal advisers, both her former and her
present one, looked to this court for their client's deliverance from
the extreme penalty of the law, the general public turned to a very
different remedy, that of agitation, to be exerted upon a very
different authority, an impressionable politician in the Home Office.

Up to the hour of her conviction public opinion had run strongly
against Eleanor. Whether this was deliberately aimed at by Tressamer
or not, it was the consequence of the policy adopted by him. But no
sooner had the law pronounced her doom than the tide turned with
startling rapidity, and a gigantic agitation was at once set on foot
for a reprieve.

Clergymen of mild manners and susceptible hearts went round canvassing
their parishioners for signatures to petitions. Legal gentlemen,
whose practice did not yet correspond to their own opinion of their
deserts, rushed into print with gratuitous opinions on the evidence
and the various points in the case. Newspaper reporters, sensitively
alive to the first symptoms of a 'boom,' wrote up the tragic situation
with graphic pens. They described the youth and beauty of the
prisoner, her gentle bringing up, her desolate condition. Even her
relations with the counsel for the defence, of which some inkling had
transpired, were freely glanced at, and the reader was invited to
sympathize with the despair of the lover as well as of the beloved.

Then the illustrated journals took it up. They had already given
pictures of the scene of the crime, of the deceased, and of other
ch