ook of probability.

I was cautioned in the usual manner and asked if I had anything to say.

I replied that I was innocent, but that I would wait for legal
assistance before I defended myself. The justice remanded me and the
examination was over. Three days later my unhappy mistress was subjected
to the same trial. I was not allowed to communicate with her. All I
knew was that the lawyer had arrived from London to help her. Toward the
evening he was admitted to see me. He shook his head sorrowfully when I
asked after my mistress.

"I am afraid," he said, "that she has sunk under the horror of the
situation in which that vile woman has placed her. Weakened by her
previous agitation, she seems to have given way under this last shock,
tenderly and carefully as Mr. Philip Nicholson broke the bad news
to her. All her feelings appeared to be strangely blunted at the
examination to-day. She answered the questions put to her quite
correctly, but at the same time quite mechanically, with no change
in her complexion, or in her tone of voice, or in her manner, from
beginning to end. It is a sad thing, William, when women cannot get
their natural vent of weeping, and your mistress has not shed a tear
since she left Darrock Hall."

"But surely, sir," I said, "if my examination has not proved Josephine's
perjury, my mistress's examination must have exposed it?"

"Nothing will expose it," answered the lawyer, "but producing Mr. James
Smith, or, at least, legally proving that he is alive. Morally speaking,
I have no doubt that the justice before whom you have been examined is
as firmly convinced as we can be that the quadroon has perjured herself.
Morally speaking, he believes that those threats which your mistress
unfortunately used referred (as she said they did to-day) to her
intention of leaving the Hall early in the morning, with you for her
attendant, and coming to me, if she had been well enough to travel, to
seek effectual legal protection from her husband for the future. Mr.
Nicholson believes that; and I, who know more of the circumstances than
he does, believe also that Mr. James Smith stole away from Darrock Hall
in the night under fear of being indicted for bigamy. But if I can't
find him--if I can't prove him to be alive--if I can't account for those
spots of blood on the night-gown, the accidental circumstances of the
case remain unexplained--your mistress's rash language, the bad terms
on which she has lived with