Luke stood like one turned to stone, his eyes now fixed on vacancy, his brief grasped in his hand, and his face deadly pale. The moment had arrived for him to commence the prosecution, but his thoughts were back at Lawford, and, like a rapid panorama, there passed before his eyes the old schoolhouses, and the figure of the bright, clever young mistress in the midst of her pupils, while he seemed to hear their merry voices as they darted out into the sunshine, dismissed for the day. Then he was studying for the mastership, and was back at the training college. That was not the judge seated on his left, but the vice-principal, and those were not spectators and reporters ranged there, tier above tier, with open books and ready pencils, but fellow-students; and he was down before them, at the great black board, helpless and ashamed, for the judge--no, it was the vice-principal--had called him down from his seat, and said--"In any right-angled triangle the square of the sides subtending the right angle is equal to the square of the sides containing the right angle. Prove it." Prove it! And that forty-seventh problem of the first book of Euclid that he knew so well had gone, as it were, right out of his memory, leaving but a blank. There was a faint buzz and rustle amongst the students as it seemed to him in this waking nightmare, and the vice-principal said--"We are all ready, Mr Ross." Still not a word would come. Some of the students would be, he knew, pitying him, not knowing how soon their own turn might come, while others he felt would be triumphant, being jealous of his bygone success. He knew that book so well, too; and somehow Sage Portlock had obtained a seat amongst the students, and was waiting to hear him demonstrate the problem, drawing it with a piece of chalk on the black board, and showing how the angle ABC was equal to the angle DEF, and so on, and so on. "We are all ready, Mr Ross," came from the vice-principal again. No, it was from the judge, and it was not the theatre at Saint Chrysostom's, but the court at the Old Bailey, where he was to prosecute Cyril Mallow, his old rival, the husband of the woman he had loved, for forgery and fraud; and his throat was dry, his tongue clave to the roof of his mouth, and his thoughts were wandering away. And yet his senses were painfully acute to all that passed. He knew that Serjeant Towle had chuckled fatly, after fixing his great double eyeglass to gaze at him. Then, as distinctly as if the words were uttered in his ear, he heard one of the briefless whisper-- "He has lost his nerve." There was an increase in the buzzing noise, and an usher called out loudly, "Silence." "Ross, Mr Ross! For heaven's sake go on," whispered Mr Swift, excitedly; and Luke felt a twitching at his gown.