rebuffed and
watched him vanish into the building.

Then she stamped her foot and her pretty mouth trembled.

"Oaf!" she said aloud.

CHAPTER XVI. THE EVIDENCE

The board of officers convened by Marshal Beresford to form the court
that was to try Captain Tremayne, was presided over by General Sir Harry
Stapleton, who was in command of the British troops quartered in Lisbon.
It included, amongst others, the adjutant-general, Sir Terence O'Moy;
Colonel Fletcher of the Engineers, who had come in haste from Torres
Vedras, having first desired to be included in the board chiefly on
account of his friendship for Tremayne; and Major Carruthers. The
judge-advocate's task of conducting the case against the prisoner was
deputed to the quartermaster of Tremayne's own regiment, Major Swan.

The court sat in a long, cheerless hall, once the refectory of the
Franciscans, who had been the first tenants of Monsanto. It was
stone-flagged, the windows set at a height of some ten feet from the
ground, the bare, whitewashed walls hung with very wooden portraits of
long-departed kings and princes of Portugal who had been benefactors of
the order.

The court occupied the abbot's table, which was set on a shallow dais at
the end of the room--a table of stone with a covering of oak, over which
a green cloth had been spread; the officers--twelve in number, besides
the president--sat with their backs to the wall, immediately under the
inevitable picture of the Last Supper.

The court being sworn, Captain Tremayne was brought in by the
provost-marshal's guard and given a stool placed immediately before and
a few paces from the table. Perfectly calm and imperturbable, he saluted
the court, and sat down, his guards remaining some paces behind him.

He had declined all offers of a friend to represent him, on the grounds
that the court could not possibly afford him a case to answer.

The president, a florid, rather pompous man, who spoke with a faint
lisp, cleared his throat and read the charge against the prisoner from
the sheet with which he had been supplied--the charge of having violated
the recent enactment against duelling made by the Commander-in-Chief
of his Majesty's forces in the Peninsula, in so far as he had fought:
a duel with Count Jeronymo de Samoval, and of murder in so far as that
duel, conducted in an irregular manner, and without any witnesses, had
resulted in the death of the said Count Jeronymo de Samoval.

"H