There were various accounts of the behaviour of the prisoner. Some said that he was desperately hardened--others, sunk in sullen apathy and indifference--and one or two persons belonging to the parish who had seen him declared that he seemed to care not for himself, but to be plunged in profound melancholy for the fate of Margaret Burnside, whose name he involuntarily mentioned, and then bowed his head on his knees and wept. His guilt he neither admitted at that interview, nor denied; but he confessed that some circumstances bore hard against him, and that he was prepared for the event of his trial--condemnation and death. "But if you are not guilty, Ludovic, _who can be the murderer_? Not the slightest shade of suspicion has fallen on any other person--and did not, alas! the body bleed when"--The unhappy wretch sprang up from the bed, it was said, at these words, and hurried like a madman back and forward along the stone floor of his cell. "Yea--yea!" at last he cried, "the mouth and nostrils of my Margaret did indeed bleed when they pressed down my hand on her cold bosom. It is God's truth!" "God's truth?"--"Yes--God's truth, I saw first one drop, and then another, trickle towards me--and I prayed to our Saviour to wipe them off before other eyes might behold the dreadful witnesses against me; but at that hour Heaven was most unmerciful--for those two small drops--as all of you saw--soon became a very stream--and all her face, neck, and breast--you saw it as well as I miserable--were at last drenched in blood. Then I may have confessed that I was guilty--did I, or did I not, confess it? Tell me--for I remember nothing distinctly;--but if I did--the judgment of offended Heaven, then punishing me for my sins, had made me worse than mad--and so had all your abhorrent eyes; and men, if I did confess, it was the cruelty of God that drove me to it--and your cruelty--which was great; for no pity had any one for me that day, though Margaret Burnside lay before me a murdered corpse--and a hoarse whisper came to my ear urging me to confess--I well believe from no human lips, but from the Father of Lies, who, at that hour, was suffered to leave the pit to ensnare my soul." Such was said to have been the main sense of what he uttered in the presence of two or three who had formerly been among his most intimate friends, and who knew not, on leaving his cell and coming into the open air, whether to think him innocent or guilty. As long as they thought they saw his eyes regarding them, and that they heard his voice speaking, they believed him innocent; but when the expression of the tone of his voice, and of the look of his eyes--which they had felt belonged to innocence--died away from their memory--then arose against him the strong, strange, circumstantial evidence, which, wisely or unwisely, lawyers and judges have said _cannot lie_--and then, in their hearts, one and all of them pronounced him guilty.