When the box was filled at last she regarded the occupants attentively. They were hard-featured men of middle age, with long bare upper lip and compressed mouth. Their grey skin was furrowed with lines of care and hardship, their chin whiskers grizzled and scant. Their eyebrows stood out over faded eyes in wrinkled sockets. But what excited Patience’s wonder was the small size of the heads. She had never seen twelve heads so little. They were hardly an advance upon their hairy ancestors. Throughout the trial she furtively watched the twelve faces of those twelve meagre heads. Never once did their expression, stolid and set, change. At night they haunted her. She awoke in the morning with a violent start, seeing them for a moment in a row on the foot board of her bed. She speculated, at times, upon the lives of those men, those pinched grubbing lives, and felt for them a sort of terrified pity. What a mere glimpse of the world she had had, after all, and what ugly strata it had! What was the matter with civilisation? XIII On the fourth day the district attorney opened the case with an address to the jury which was a masterpiece of temperate statement and damning suggestion. He dwelt long upon the remarkable points of the case: the youth and beauty and intelligence and social position of the defendant, the distinguished family which had been plunged into sorrow and disgrace by her crime, the extraordinary interest the crime had excited throughout the civilised world. He then gave a running account, clear and straightforward and decisive, of what the prosecution would prove, and concluded with a cold, terse, but reiterated warning that the prisoner at the bar was entitled to no sympathy because of her sex and position; that he and the jury were there for one purpose only: to consider the facts of the case and to do their plain duty, utterly regardless of consequences to the individual. Every word was chosen and weighed, and told like the ring of a steel hammer on a steel plate. Dr. Lewis was then called to prove the fact of Beverly Peele’s death, and his vigorous story weighed heavily in the scales against the defence. The moment the district attorney sat down Bourke was on his feet. For a moment he stood lifting and shaking the loose cloth of the table beside him; then asked one or two random questions which put the witness for the prosecution quite at his ease. In the course of a moment the witness began to writhe, and at the end of five minutes manifested his consciousness of the fact that he was a small country practitioner, to be regarded by any intelligent jury with contempt. Nevertheless, it was impossible to shake his testimony.