The Court adjourned for lunch after the two seamen had given their evidence; I remained in the court with my aunt. Mr. Johnstone came to us, and I asked him what he thought the verdict would be. ‘Wait for it! Wait for it!’ he exclaimed, petulant with worry and doubts. ‘Did not I tell Butler that he had heavily blundered in over-insuring? And how well Rotch gave his evidence! How frank were the devil’s admissions! Never a wink or a stutter with him from beginning to end! But the twelve have yet to hear the sergeant. Keep up your spirits, Marian!’ And he abruptly left us, but not without exchanging a look with his wife. I caught that look, and my heart sank and turned cold, as though the hand of death had grasped it. When the Court reassembled, five witnesses were called to speak to Tom’s character. It was shortly before four when the judge had finished summing up. I had followed Sergeant Shee’s address with impassioned attention, eagerly watching the faces of the jurymen as he spoke, and detesting the judge for the sleepy air with which he listened and the barristers at the table and the people round about for their inattention and frequent whispers and passing of papers one to another on business of their own, as though the drama of life or death to me which had nearly filled the day had grown tiresome, and they were waiting for the curtain. Then I had followed with a maddening conflict of emotion, but with an ever-gaining feeling of sickness and faintness, like to the sense of a poisoned and killing conviction slowly creeping to the heart against its maddest current of hopes and protests--thus had I listened to the address of the counsel for the prosecution who replied upon the whole case; and now I listened to Mr. Justice Maule’s summing-up, a tedious and inconclusive address. He made little of the points which I believed he would have insisted upon. He talked like a tired man, he retold the testimony, and I seemed to find a prejudice against Tom throughout his delivery. Then it was left to the jury, and the jury, after an absence of twenty minutes, returned with the verdict of ‘Guilty’ against the prisoner.