y're coming!" The
light-hearted chatter had died away on the word; perhaps it was not so
light-hearted after all. But the alarm was false, there was no sign of
the jury, and the talk rose again, as the wind will in a storm.

"We shall want a glass when this is over," whispered one of the pair who
had argued about the case.

"And we'll have it, too, old man!" rejoined his friend.

The white-haired man was grimly interested. So this was the way men
talked while waiting to hear a fellow-creature sentenced to death! It
was worth knowing. And this was what the newspaper men would call a low
buzz--an expectant hush--this animated babble! Yet the air was charged
with emotion, suppressed perhaps, but none the less distinguishable in
every voice. Within earshot a perspiring young pressman was informing
his friends that to come there comfortably you should commit the murder
yourself, then they gave you the Royal Box; but his teeth could be heard
chattering through the feeble felicity. The white-headed listener curled
a contemptuous nostril. They could joke, and yet they could feel! He
himself betrayed neither weakness, but sat waiting patiently and idly
listening, with the same grim jaw and the same inscrutable eye with
which he had watched the prisoner and the jury alternately throughout
the week. And when the latter at last returned, and then the former, it
was the same subtle stare that he again bent upon them both in turn.

The jury had been absent but forty minutes after all; and their
expedition seemed as ill an omen as their nervous and responsible faces.
There was a moment's hush, another moment of prophetic murmurs, and then
a stillness worthy of its subsequent description in every newspaper. The
prisoner was standing in the front of the dock, a female warder upon
either hand. The lightning pencil of the new journalist had its will of
her at last. For Mrs. Minchin had dispensed not only with the chair
which she had occupied all the week, but also with the heavy veil which
she had but partially lifted during her brief sojourn in the
witness-box, and never once in the dock. The veil was now flung back
over the widow's bonnet, peaking and falling like a sable cowl, against
which the unearthly pallor of her face was whiter far then that of the
merely dead, just as mere death was the least part of the fate
confronting her. Yet she had raised her veil to look it fairly in the
face, and the packed assembly marvelled as it ga