Patience’s life from “its fiendish childhood” was rehearsed with such consecutive logic that crime at some point of such a woman’s career was inevitable. The only wonder was that it had not been committed sooner. The threats, he demonstrated, whether uttered in moments of passion or not, were the significant output of a brooding mind. The “cruel letter to a dying man” was read with slow and indignant emphasis. Then the events of the fatal day and night, the quarrels, the prisoner’s fury at being denied a divorce, the deceased’s threat to live twenty years to spite her, her carefully rehearsed and absurd story that her husband had dropped the morphine himself,—something he knew himself physically incapable of doing,—the equal absurdity of his suicide when a greater revenge lay in his hands, her brutal indifference while he lay dying, were deliberately gone over with passionless and insidious effect. The quiet half-lit room was oddly in keeping with the deadly methods of the man. When he had made the most of her flight on the morning of the “Eye” story, he paused a moment, during which the rising wind could be heard in the trees. Within, there was no sound. No one seemed breathing. Bourke and Patience were in deep shadow. With an instinct of protection he clasped his hand suddenly about hers. Sturges resumed, with lowered and vibrating voice: “And—where—Gentlemen of the Jury,—was—this—woman—arrested?——_In the house of a harlot!_” He paused another half moment. “In the house of her oldest friend, La Rosita, one of the most abandoned women in America.” Bourke’s hand twitched spasmodically. Simms twisted his neck, and shot at Lansing an uneasy glance. Patience shuddered. For the moment she forgot Bourke. She felt as if a cobra were folding her about,—very slowly, and gently, and inexorably. When Sturges sat down the jury was told to rise. The judge stood under one of the lamps and read them his charge. He explained that unless they could find the prisoner guilty of murder in the first degree—of deliberate premeditated murder—they must acquit her. As the final quarrel had taken place an hour before the killing it was obviously impossible that she could have dropped the morphine in a moment of excitement; and a verdict of self-defence would be equally absurd. He also charged them that they were to consider the law in the case and nothing but the law,—that human sympathy must have no place in their verdict. Bourke was too able a lawyer not to have the last word. As the judge sat down, he arose with several sheets of manuscript, and for twenty minutes asked the judge to charge the jury so and so, practically recapitulating all the strong points of the defence. The judge answered mechanically, “I so charge,” and at last the patient jury was conducted out of the court room and locked up. Bourke was surrounded at once.