and with more tears
than a son so unnatural deserved) was at once as damning and as
painful as anything of the kind ever heard in a court of justice. The
claim to be Paul Ritson was answered by the evidence of Mr. Hugh
Ritson, mine-owner in Cumberland, and brother of the gentleman whom
the prisoner wished to personate. Mr. H. Ritson admitted a
resemblance, but had no hesitation in saying that the accused was not
his brother. The prisoner thereupon applied to the court that the
wife of Paul Ritson should be examined, but, as it was explained that
both husband and wife were at present ill in Cumberland, the court
wisely ruled against the application. As a final freak of defense,
the prisoner asked for the examination of one Mercy Fisher, who, he
said, would be able to say by what circumstances he came to wear the
clothes of the guilty man. The court adjourned for an hour in order
that this person might be produced, but on reassembling it was
explained that the girl, who turned out to be a mistress whom Drayton
had kept at his mother's house, had disappeared. Thus, with a
well-merited sentence of three years' penal servitude, ended a trial
of which the vulgarity of detail was only equalled by the audacity of
defense."

A week passed, and the public had almost forgotten the incidents of the
trial, when the following paragraph appeared in a weekly journal:

"I have heard that the man who was sentenced to three years' penal
servitude for robbery at the scene of the Hendon accident was seized
with an attack of brain fever immediately upon his arrival at
Millbank. The facts that transpire within that place of retirement
are whispered with as much reserve as guards the secrets of another
kind of confessional, but I do hear that since the admission of the
man who was known on his trial as Paul Drayton, and who is now
indicated by a numerical cognomen, certain facts have come to light
which favor the defense he set up of mistaken identity."

CHAPTER XXII.

The chapter room of St. Margaret's Convent was a chill, bare chamber
containing an oak table and four or five plain oak chairs. On the
painted walls, which were of dun gray, there was an etching by a
Florentine master of the flight into Egypt, and a symbolic print of the
Sacred Heart. Besides these pictures there was but a single text to
relieve the blindness of the empty walls, and i