A true witness delivereth souls.—Proverbs.  
Late in February a blizzard swept over the north; it was followed by still, intense, stringent cold. By night the fogs were dense; by day the white world glittered in sunshine. Trees of snow-blossom and iron filigree raised their heads, as white as plumes, against a china-blue sky. Posts, hedges, buildings, snow-hooded and sparkling, rising out of pearly frost-haze, threw azure shadows on the softly rippled velvet of the drift. Country lanes were buried many feet deep, but a passage had been carved down the Westby road; the slow carts, lumbering in to market, crunched their way between tall, strange, silvery and chalky-white cliffs, like the sugar icing on a bridecake, along tracks made golden with the scattered sand. The sun found rainbows in the icicles and diamonds in the snow, but it did not melt them; and at night, under the sweet influences of the Pleiades and the jeweled bands of Orion, the frost struck deeper and deeper into the earth, the ice grew thicker and thicker on the steely lakes.
 
In spite of the weather, Westby was full. Not only was it market-day, but the Assizes were on, with a sensational case. Everybody knew that the late owner of the Easedale Hotel was to be tried for killing one of his own guests. The celebrated Hancock, K.C., had been retained for the Crown; and Bullard, for the defense, was only less popular. Moreover, the case was to be tried before Mr. Justice Beckwith, who was said to be dead nuts on crimes of violence. Blue look-out for the prisoner, every one agreed. The court was crowded, stuffy, and bitterly cold. Mr. Gardiner, a valorous[Pg 171] and pathetic little figure, shivered and coughed under his rusty inverness. Tom was doing his best to keep him covered up; but as often as he tucked the capes round his father's shoulders, that perverse and petulant invalid tossed them back. "I can't listen stuffed up like that!" he complained.
 
Tom was gloomy. This was the second day of the trial; he had heard Hancock open for the Crown, he had listened to the evidence of the police, Dr. Scott, Miss Marvin, Louisa; and he felt it was all up with his brother. What was more, he knew that Kellett the lawyer thought so too. "It's unlucky, most unlucky, that Mr. Gardiner can't remember Major Trent's actual words," was all he would say when they discussed it; and he pulled a very long face on hearing the name of the judge. "Beckwith? Well, he hasn't a reputation for leniency, certainly!" Tom was fully expecting penal servitude. He saw no ray of hope. Unless, by any wild chance—there were those unexpected and seemingly aimless questions which Bullard had put to Miss Marvin, questions about the rooms and the other guests—was it possible that they had a hidden meaning? Had something fresh turned up at the last minute? Had Kellett a surprise up his sleeve? No, Tom decided, it was not possible, it was absurd to imagine it. He returned to his gloom.
 
As to the prisoner, he had summoned just enough surface gayety to take in the reporters and his father, whose eyes were dim; but beneath it he looked sick, and sorry, and desperately tired. Heavy lines were drawn to the corners of his mouth, and his jaw-bone stuck out, gaunt and ugly, from hollows under the ear where his neck was corded like an old man's. Tom could see his throat swelling with suppressed yawns; but he woke up at any stir among the spectators. Again and again his eyes went questing eagerly round the benches. What was he looking for? Tom had no idea. He had never heard of Lettice Smith.
 
"Who's that? Who is it going into the box now, Tom?"
 
"That's Mrs. Trent, sir."
 
General thrill in court. Dorothea had resumed her[Pg 172] widow's weeds together with her married name; and very young she looked, and fair, and pathetic, under the flowing veil. From Hancock's point of view, this was as it should be. It would take a deal of sentiment to make her past proceedings go down with the jury. Perhaps Dorothea knew this. Perhaps she was playing to the gallery. Perhaps, on the other hand, she was only playing to herself—acting what she knew she ought to feel, in order to persuade herself that she did feel it. Dorothea was a great hand at believing what she wanted to. However that might be, she was undoubtedly pathetic; and with her romantic story fresh in their minds from Hancock's opening speech, the jury were duly impressed.
 
She struck the right note at once. "My husband was not intoxicated!" she said indignantly. "He was only very, very anxious for my comfort!" Half-a-dozen credible witnesses had sworn that Trent was intoxicated, but no matter; the point was that, after nearly a year of marriage, he appeared as still a hero to his wife. Next came Dorothea's own part in the drama. She described the scene: the lamp on the floor, the confusion of both men, Denis's attempt to keep her out, Gardiner's unconcealed terror. "I told him he had murdered my husband, and he didn't deny it. He cowered back against the wall with his arm across his eyes, so, but he never attempted to deny it!" She told how, kneeling on the floor beside her dead husband, she had come upon the chisel. "I slipped it under my cloak. No, I didn't mean to hide it. It was only that I—I—I couldn't speak just then. I was thinking of my husband." Was it art that made her voice fail, or nature? "I don't know what happened next. I don't remember speaking to my maid. I don't remember anything. I think I fainted. I was ill afterwards. No, I didn't accuse the prisoner later on because I knew it wouldn't be any good. I was sure in my own mind that he had killed my husband, but I had no proof. I knew people would say it was just my fancy. So then I set myself to get proofs—"
 
Because he knew it was bound to come out, Hancock took[Pg 173] her through the story of her attempt on Gardiner. That gun must be surrendered to the enemy, but he would see that it was spiked first. Dorothea's behavior must be palliated by showing her fanatical devotion to her husband. No need to dwell on the scene at the crucifix, what Gardiner himself called the shilling-shocker part of the affair. Both sides were equally anxious to leave that in a decent obscurity. "Yes, I did pretend to be friends with him, and I did ask him, as a friend, to tell me the truth," Dorothea defiantly avowed. "Yes, I did know I was being hateful, and mean, and contemptible. But what did that matter? I had to see justice done!" Jael, and Judith, and Charlotte Corday—and Dorothea Trent? Her story ended in a storm of tears, which broke, strange to say, after she had done with Gardiner and was telling of her sojourn at Dent-de-lion. But no one in court dreamed of connecting her emotion with that part of her tale.
 
"I'd be sorry to be a Broad Churchman and not believe in hell," Mr. Gardiner commented with gusto. "Who's this now, Tom?"
 
"That? Oh, that's Merion-Smith—poor beggar!"
 
Another general stir. This was due partly to Denis's profession (for airmen weren't so common in the Lakes then as they have since become), and partly to his dramatic share in the story. A whisper went round, which was the well-informed telling the ignorant about the inquest. Denis's chin went up a shade higher. He had set his back against his family tree, and looked down arrogantly through his eyeglass on the court and all therein. It was plain he meant to give trouble.
 
The beginning ran smoothly. He told of Trent's intrusion, bending aside the questions to show how Gardiner had gone out of his way to avoid a quarrel. This was familiar ground; not so the conversation that had followed. Counsel would fain have passed over the details of Trent's discourse, but Denis intended the court to hear as much as he could possibly get in. Out came the story of the little girl at Chatham, sounding twice as bad by contrast on Denis's lips.[Pg 174] The prisoner grinned. While ostensibly giving his evidence with distaste and reluctance (and indeed both sentiments were genuine enough), Denis was supplying the best, the only excuse for his friend. Vainly did his questioner try to show him as the straight-laced Puritan, to whom the mildest of jokes is an offense. Denis would not fit into the part.
 
"At last, when we had stood as much as we could, the prisoner suggested it was gettin' late. Trent made a joking answer. What he said was grossly offensive, worse than anything before. The prisoner caught up a chisel and flung it at his head. No, it was not premeditated. No, there had been no quarrel. Simply, the man was saying indecencies that had to be stopped, and the prisoner took the first way of stoppin' them—and if he hadn't, I'd've done it myself," Denis put in, unasked. "No, I cann't remember what it was he said—"
 
Instantly Hancock pricked up his ears. "You don't remember what Major Trent said?"
 
"I do not. Not the exact words."
 
"Not any of them?"
 
"Not to swear to."
 
"Indeed! Yet you could tell us in detail all about his other speeches?"
 
"Not so," Denis corrected, rather stiff. "I did not tell you in detail, I told you in substance. That is quite another thing."
 
"With considerable fullness and fluency, however," said his questioner dryly. "Well, then: you remember all these other stories, so far as you do remember them, but you have forgotten every single word of this—which you say was the worst of all? Can't you give us the substance of that too?"
 
"It was not a story," said Denis, now very stiff indeed, "it was a few broken sentences. I cann't remember them accurately, and I won't make guesses. I dismissed them from memory as soon as I could. I don't burden my mind with pornographic details."
 
[Pg 175]
 
"Quite so; but surely without infringing either truth or decency you can give us some rough idea as to what this mysterious speech was about? Was it about a woman, for example?"
 
Denis remained obstinately silent.
 
"Can't remember even that? Only you are sure it was offensive?"
 
"It was insufferable."
 
The barrister leaned forward persuasively. "How about this for a suggestion? I put it to you: was it not to the prisoner personally that the deceased was offensive? And did not the prisoner lose his temper, and retaliate by throwing the chisel?"
 
"Nothing of the sort. I have told you before: there was no quarrel of any kind. The deceased was laughing up to the last moment, and what the prisoner di............