ed quickly in his direction and then as quickly
averted her gaze. But in that fleeting glance of her beautiful dark eyes
Crewe detected an expression of fear, as though she dreaded his presence,
and he noticed that she shivered slightly as she turned to resume her
conversation with Miss Fewbanks.

His Honour Mr. Justice Hodson entered, and the persons in the court
scrambled hurriedly to their feet to pay their tribute of respect to
British law, as exemplified in the person of a stout red-faced old
gentleman wearing a scarlet gown and black sash, and attended by four of
the Sheriffs of London in their fur-trimmed robes. The judge bowed in
response and took his seat. The spectators resumed theirs, craning their
necks eagerly to look at the accused man, Birchill, who was brought into
the dock by two warders. The work of empanelling a jury commenced, and
when it was completed Mr. Walters, K.C., opened the case for the
prosecution.

Mr. Walters was a long-winded Counsel who had detested the late Mr.
Justice Fewbanks because of the latter's habit of interrupting the
addresses of Counsel with the object of inducing them to curtail their
remarks. This practice was not only annoying to Counsel, who necessarily
knew better than the judge what the jury ought to be told, but it also
tended to hold Counsel up to ridicule in the eyes of ignorant jurymen as
a man who could not do his work properly without the watchful correction
of the judge. But Mr. Walters, whose legal training had imbued in him a
respect for Latin tags, subscribed to the adage, _de mortuis nil nisi
bonum_. Therefore he began his address to the jury with a glowing
reference to the loss, he might almost say the irreparable loss, which
the judiciary had sustained, he would go so far as to say the loss which
the nation had sustained by the death, the violent death, in short, the
murder, of an eminent judge of the High Court Bench, whose clear and
vigorous intellect, whose marvellous mastery of the legal principles laid
down by the judicial giants of the past, whose inexhaustible knowledge
drawn from the storehouses of British law, whose virile interpretations
of the principles of British justice, whose unfailing courtesy and
consideration to Counsel, the memory of which would long be cherished by
those who had had the privilege of pleading before him, had made him an
acquisition and an ornament to a Bench which in the eyes of the nation
had always represented, and at