Lionel Dering had been nearly a month in prison. Confinement to a man of his active outdoor habits was especially irksome, and Tom was not surprised to find him looking pale and more careworn than he had ever seen him look before. He was extraordinarily cheerful, however; and when Tom told him that it was his intention to stay at Duxley till the trial was over, he brightened up still more, and at once proposed that they two should have a game at chess, there and then, as in the old pleasant days at Gatehouse Farm. “Dux is very good to me,” he explained. “He comes to see me for an hour most evenings. He and I have had several games together. The turnkey will fetch his board and men in five minutes.” Mr. Hoskyns was somewhat scandalized. “I cannot get my client,” he explained to Tom, “to evince that interest in his trial, and the arrangements for his defence, that the importance of the occasion demands. It really almost seems as if Mr. Dering looked upon the whole business as referring, not to himself, but to some stranger in whose affairs he took only the faintest possible interest.” “My dear Hoskyns,” said Lionel, “you pumped me dry long ago of every morsel of information that I could give you respecting this wretched business. You can get nothing more out of me, and may as well leave me in peace. Employ whom you will to defend me, if defence I need. That is your business, not mine.” So Tom and Lionel had their game of chess, and a long talk together afterwards, and when Tom at last left the prison, it was with a promise to be there again at an early hour next morning. Lionel Dering’s first care after his arrest was to write to Edith West, in order that she might learn the news direct from himself, and not through a newspaper or any other source. “My darling Edith,” he wrote, “a terrible misfortune has befallen me. A gentleman, Mr. Percy Osmond by name, one of my guests at Park Newton, has been foully murdered, and I am accused of the crime. That my innocence will be made clear to the world at my trial, I do not doubt. Till that day comes I must submit, with what patience I may, to be kept closely under lock and key in this grim building from which I write. You see that I write quite calmly, and without any fear whatever as to the result. My greatest trouble in the matter is my enforced deprivation of your dear society for a little while. I will write you fuller particulars to-morrow. I am afraid that it will be necessary to fix the date of our marriage a month later than the time agreed upon, but certainly not more than a month. That of itself is very annoying. I beg that you will not fret or worry yourself on my account. This is but a little trial which will soon be over, and which, years hence, will shape itself into a seasonable story to be told round the Christmas fire.”