No one in court had ever seen this man before; no one but the Under
Sheriff learnt his name during the week; but by the third day his
identity was a subject of discussion, both by the professional students
of the human countenance, who sat behind him (balked of their study by
the prisoner's veil), and among the various functionaries who had
already found him as free with a sovereign as most gentlemen are with a
piece of silver. So every day he was ushered with ceremony to the same
place, at the inner end of the lowest row; there he would sit watching
the prisoner, a trifle nearer her than those beside or behind him; and
only once was his attentive serenity broken for an instant by a change
of expression due to any development of the case.
It was not when the prisoner pleaded clearly through her veil, in the
first breathless minutes of all; it was not a little later, when the
urbane counsel for the prosecution, wagging his pince-nez at the jury,
thrilled every other hearer with a mellifluous forecast of the new
evidence to be laid before them. The missing watch and chain had been
found; they would presently be produced, and the jury would have an
opportunity of examining them, together with a plan of the chimney of
the room in which the murder had been committed; for it was there that
they had been discovered upon a second search instituted since the
proceedings before the magistrates.
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