“Eh?” inquired Mr. Eden, “oh! ah! I forgot,” said he naively. “No! that is nonsense, Susan. You have still an immense Cr. against my name; but I know a way--Mrs. Davies, for as simple as I sit here you see in me the ecclesiastic that shall unite this young lady to an honest man, who, report says, loves her very dearly; so I mean to square our little account.” “That is fair, Susan; what do you say?” “La, aunt! why I shouldn't look upon it as a marriage at all if any clergyman but Mr. Eden said the words.” “That is right,” laughed Mr. Eden, “always set some little man above some great thing, and then you will always be--a woman. I must write the plot of my sermon, ladies, but you can talk to me all the same.” He wrote and purred every now and then to the women, who purred to each other and now and then to him. Neither Hawes nor any other irritation rankled in his heart, or even stuck fast in his memory. He had two sermons to prepare for Sunday next, and he threw his mind into them as he had into the battle he had just won. “Hoc agebat.” CHAPTER XXVII. His reverence in the late battle showed himself a strategist, and won without bringing up his reserves; if he had failed with Mr. Lacy he had another arrow behind in his quiver. He had been twice to the mayor and claimed a coroner's jury to sit on a suicide. The mayor had consented and the preliminary steps had been taken. The morning after the jailer's dismissal the inquest was held. Mr. Eden, Evans, Fry and others were examined, and the case came out as clear as the day and black as the night. When twelve honest Englishmen, men of plain sense, not men of system, men taken from the public not from public offices, sat in a circle with the corpse of a countryman at their knees, fiebat lux; 'twas as though twelve suns had burst into a dust-hole. “Manslaughter!” cried they, and they sent their spokesman to the mayor and said yet more light must be let into this dusthole, and the mayor said, “Ay and it shall, too. I will write to London and demand more light.” And the men of the public went to their own homes and told their wives and children and neighbors what cruelties and villainies they had unearthed, and their hearers, being men and women of that people, which is a god in intellect and in heart compared with the criticasters that try to misguide it with their shallow guesses and cant and with the clerks that execute it in other men's names, cried out, “See now! What is the use our building courts of law or prisons unless they are to be open unto us. Shut us out--keep walls and closed gate between us and our servants--and what comes of our courts of law and our prisons? Why they turn nests of villainy in less than no time.”