"What are you, Mr Hartzen?" Mr Paget asked, referring to his brief at the same moment. "Police agent." "And your nationality?" "Russian." The old man a police agent! Dumbfounded, I looked blankly around me. "You are father of the previous witness?" "I am." "Now, what evidence can you give regarding the charge against the prisoner?" There was a dead and painful silence. "We first met at the Hotel Isotta, Genoa, about a month after the murder in Bedford Place. We frequently played _ecarte_ together, and on one occasion he paid me a debt with the three five-pound notes I now produce." "And what is there peculiar about them?" "I have since ascertained that their numbers correspond with those now known to have been stolen from the house in Bedford Place." The thought flashed across my mind that once, when I had lost to him, I had discharged the debt with three notes. From whom I received them I could not tell. "What else do you know about the affair?" was the insinuating question of the prosecuting counsel. "Well; some three months after this I was present at the Central Tribunal at St Petersburg, when prisoner was sentenced to the mines for complicity in the murder of a hotel-keeper. The sentence, however, was never carried out, for on the way to Siberia he escaped, returning to England." "It's a lie! I was exiled without trial," I shouted. Amid the loud cries of "Silence," counsel turned to the judge, and with a cruel smile about his lips remarked, "You see, my lord, prisoner admits he was exiled." Mr Roland made an impatient motion to me to preserve silence; so seeing my protests were useless, I sank again into my chair, and tried to conquer my fate by bearing it. Mr Crane the junior counsel defending me, cross-examined him at some length, but resumed his seat without being able to shake his testimony. The waiter who had attended to me at the Charing Cross Hotel, and two of my own servants were called, but their evidence was immaterial and uninteresting. I felt a strange morbid yielding to a superstitious feeling that I could not shake off, and sat as one in a dream, until the Court rose and I was sent back to my cell. CHAPTER THIRTY. THE ELEVENTH HOUR. Next morning my trial was resumed. There was the same array of counsel; the same crowd of curious onlookers lounging on the benches like carrion crows around a carcase; the same strange, half-visionary procession of judges, lawyers and witnesses, who passed and repassed before me, sometimes ludicrous, but generally gloomy and depressing. The jury looked pale and weary. They had been locked up during the night, and now several of them were yawning. None gave indication that they felt the responsibility of the sentence they had to pronounce. I sat in the dock heedless of everything; I had grown callous. I had one thought only: Why had not Vera made her promised explanation? A few minor witnesses were called, and the case for the prosecution closed.