From one pair of eyes at least, his talents, which had at last wrested recognition from a jealous, narrow, conventional world, had not been able to hide the dangers with which they were girt. This aged judge had pierced the secret. Those senile old eyes, alone of those in the court, had seen the pitfalls which lay beneath his triumph. He ought to have been overwhelmingly happy in this new perambulation of the darkness. Yet the sense of humiliation was paramount. That strength upon which all his life his extravagant hopes had been nourished had proved to be even greater than he had known, but the under side of his nature, to which he had given rein in order to grasp success, opened up possibilities that were strange and awful. Truth and justice had had no meaning for the terrible genie he had called to his aid. They had been used as so many cards in a game. The judge was right: so grievous a prostitution of a noble talent was a grave public danger. On the first occasion it had been employed it had compassed a notable miscarriage of justice. Towards ten o’clock his wanderings carried him into Leicester Square. He stayed his steps under the ghastly lights of a music hall and made the discovery that he was faint with hunger and fatigue. With a dismal sense of foreboding, which habit had rendered involuntary, he thrust his hands in those pockets which on many occasions had had nothing to yield. To his joy his search was rewarded with a sovereign and a halfpenny. As he held the coins in his fingers a strange weary feeling of gratitude stole over him. His days of bodily privation were at an end. Not again would he know what it was to need food and yet lack the wherewithal of obtaining it. After all he must not dare to deride success. Its attributes were substantial, definite, necessary. As he crossed the square in search of a restaurant of whose merits he was aware, the large letters of the news-bill of an evening journal caught his eye. Murder Trial--Sensational Speech for the Defence--Scenes in Court--Verdict. “Here, boy, a paper,” he said, holding out the halfpenny. He clutched the paper greedily and crumpled it in his fist. It almost seemed as he did so that fame itself was tangible, that it was something that he could crumple in his hand. In the eating-house he passed a glorious hour in which he devoured beefsteak and potatoes and consumed a tankard of ale. He read the account of the trial over and over again, although as rendered by the evening journal it had no meaning for him. Even the bald _résumé_ of bare facts seemed far otherwise than those as rendered to himself. He could not recognize one of the incidents. Hardly a word was intelligible to the chief actor in that crowded and pregnant drama. “Mr. Norcutt for the defence spoke for two hours fifty-eight minutes. His speech was full of Biblical quotations, and even the judge was affected by it.”