During this narrative, for the first time throughout the trial, the prisoner had shown sign of outward emotion. His face had gone ghastly white as he listened, and his hand was clutching the dock rail, as he leaned forward, drinking in every word. Great Heaven! What did it all mean? he thought. Were they never going to get it over? Why had Lizzie come forward with this tale, which nobody would for a single moment believe! It could only serve to prolong his agony. And yet--! Then he became conscious of the judge's voice. Sentencing him to death--of course! "I cannot reopen the case, and call fresh evidence at this stage, Mr Windgate," his lordship was saying. "You see, the jury have already given their verdict. But I can postpone sentence. Meanwhile you had better have this young lady's statement reduced to writing and duly sworn as an affidavit, and if you can produce the supposed murdered man alive, and incontestably establish his identity, why, there is necessarily an end of the case." CHAPTER FORTY EIGHT. "A HEALTH! DORRIEN OF CRANSTON?" "What an awful young brute I must have been in those days, Roland! By Jove! any kicks that may have travelled my way I jolly well deserved." And Hubert Dorrien puffed out a great cloud of smoke upon the sweet evening air. "I think we all wanted a good shaking up," answered his brother meditatively. "We are a rum lot, you know. At any rate we seem to have got it--all round." At the further end of the beautiful avenue of feathery elms rose the tall chimney stacks and long windows of Cranston Hall. The air was fragrant with the multifold scents of evening, distilled dewy from flower and herb, and the dappled deer moved like antlered ghosts in the gathering twilight. From the lake, embowered in overhanging leafage, came the craking cry of a waterhen or the plash of a rising fish, and in the boskiness of the home coverts a very chorus of song, as innumerable thrushes and blackbirds poured forth a final evening warble. "Well, if I got some kicks, at any rate I captured plenty of halfpence," went on Hubert. "Tell you what it is, old chap: that was the best day's work that ever happened when you launched me out into the world to fish for myself." "It's rum how things do come about," said the other queerly. "Rather. If I hadn't got on board the _Atlanta_, or if she had transhipped me on to some homeward-bound craft, I shouldn't have got to Australia, and if I hadn't got to Australia I shouldn't have struck that reef, and made my pile. Not but what I didn't have some real rough ups and downs in between." "To continue the `ifs,'" said Roland, "what if you hadn't turned up when you did, this time last year? What if your boat had been wrecked, and you had taken another outward-bound trip on some rescuing craft? What then?"