eturned into court after an absence of forty minutes. The
judge, who was waiting in his private room, was informed, and he entered
the court and resumed his seat. The jury answered to their names, and
then the Clerk of Arraigns, in a sing-song voice, said:

"Gentlemen, have you agreed upon your verdict? Do you find the prisoner
guilty or not guilty of wilful murder?"

"Guilty!" answered the foreman, in a loud, clear voice.

"You say that he is guilty of murder, and that is the verdict of you
all?"

"That is the verdict of us all," was the response.

"James Ronald Penreath," continued the clerk, turning to the accused
man, and speaking in the same sing-song tones of one who repeated a
formula by rote, "you stand convicted of the crime of wilful murder.
Have you anything to say for yourself why the Court should not give you
judgment of death according to law?"

The man in the dock, who had turned very pale, merely shook his head.

The judge, with expressionless face and in an expressionless voice,
pronounced sentence of death.

CHAPTER XVII

Colwyn returned to Durrington in a perplexed and dissatisfied frame of
mind. The trial, which he had attended and followed closely, had failed
to convince him that all the facts concerning the death of Roger
Glenthorpe had been brought to light. Really, the trial had not been a
trial at all, but merely a battle of lawyers about the state of
Penreath's mind.

If Penreath was really sane--and Colwyn, who had watched him closely
during the trial, believed that he was--the Crown theory of the murder
by no means accounted for all the amazing facts of the case.

Should he have done more? Colwyn asked himself this question again and
again. But that query always led to another one--_Could_ he have done
more? In his mental probings the detective could rarely get away from
the point--and when he did get away from it he always returned to
it--that Penreath, by his dogged silence, had been largely responsible
for his own conviction. If a man, charged with murder, refused to
account for actions which pointed to him as the murderer, how could
anybody help him? Silence, in certain circumstances, was the strongest
presumptive proof of guilt. A man was the best judge of his own actions
and, if he refused to speak when his own life might pay the forfeit for
silence, he must have the strongest possible reason for holding his
tongue. What other reason could Penreath have except the con