The prisoner felt as though shot through the head, as though a numbing, sledge-hammer blow had descended upon his faculties. Was this real, this sea of ghastly faces in the deathlike gloom of the ill-lighted hall, the grim, red-robed pronouncer of doom, now turning to face him? Was it real, or some terrible nightmare from which he would awaken directly with a thrill of horror combined with intense relief and thankfulness? Then he became dimly aware of an official voice asking if he had anything to say why sentence of death should not be passed upon him. So dim did the voice sound to his wrought-up fancy that the question had to be repeated. "No. Nothing," he answered, and the judge drew on the black cap. "But I have. I have everything to say." The voice rang out upon the dead silence, full, clear and feminine. From the back of the hall it came. Every head went round in that direction as though turned with the same wire. "Let that woman be removed instantly," said the judge, whose experience was not devoid of similar cases of interruption on the part of some hysterically disposed female, worked up to exaltation pitch. "You cannot remove me until you have heard me," went on the voice, calm, firm, and without a quaver; its owner doubtless strengthened by the certainty that in the densely-packed crowd it would be impossible for the Court officers to reach her before she had said her say. "My lord, you cannot condemn this man for the murder of Hubert Dorrien, since Hubert Dorrien is alive and well at this moment. I saw him and talked with him as lately as this very morning. Then I hurried on here, and, thank God, I am in time." A thrill of indescribable emotion went up from that wrought-up audience, a gasp--that took the form of a deeply-breathed-- "Oh-h!" "Let her come forward," said the judge, his mind by no means free from suspicion that this was a carefully planned theatrical _coup_. Way was made for a tall female figure, which, advancing from the back of the room, was ushered forward, and for the sake of convenience was marshalled into the witness-box, though not sworn. And the light of the candles, clearer here in the vicinity of the Bench and Bar, revealed an exceedingly attractive face, a face, moreover, well known to many there, but to none better than the prisoner awaiting sentence of death. For it was the face of Lizzie Devine. "Hubert Dorrien is alive, my lord," she began, without waiting to be interrogated, "alive and well. He is at the Duke of Cornwall Hotel, at Plymouth, with a broken leg." At this definition of "alive and well" there was a laugh, a strange, nervous, staccato laugh, with but little merriment in it, however. Rather did it express the collective tension momentarily relaxed.