"Tennant, so far as it concerns your fate, whatever you may have to say will be without effect. For you in this world there is no hope. You had better prepare yourself for the world which is to come. Do not buoy yourself up with any hopes that anything you may say will prevent the sentence which has been pronounced upon you being executed. That sentence will certainly be carried out." The condemned man would have spoken, but the governor went on. "But the warder has just told me what you told him, and in discharge of what I hold to be my duty I have requested the detective who has been in charge of the case to come and hear what you may have to say. Here he is." And there he was--Matthew Holman, the man who looked so like a sailor. "Well, Tennant, what cock-and-bull story have you to tell us now?" "None. I have to tell you the truth." "It is time." Mr. Holman's tone was biting, his glance was keen. Mr. Tennant re-told the story of his famous journey. The detective seemed not so much to be listening to the words he uttered as searching for what might be behind them. "So you did know her? What was her name?" "I knew her as Ellen Howth. But she may have had half a dozen names before I knew her and since." The detective made a note in his pocket-book. "Where did she live?" "I have no notion. As I have told you before that night I had not seen or heard of her for years." "Describe her." Mr. Tennant described her. "You understand that, until I heard the medical evidence, I supposed that she had been killed by the fall from the carriage. When I heard what the doctors had to say I began to wonder. It became clearer and clearer to me that they could not be talking of Ellen Howth. The two descriptions did not tally. I did not believe that she was pregnant. I knew that she was over thirty, and it seemed inconceivable that a medical man could mistake a woman of considerably over thirty for a girl under twenty-one. When I saw Ellen Howth standing up there and smiling at me, in an instant it was all made plain." "What was all made plain?" "Many things. For one, it explained what seemed to me to be the discrepancies between the evidence and what I knew to be the facts--the facts, that is, so far as they concerned myself." "Where was the woman whom you say you saw standing--tell me exactly." Mr. Tennant paused to think. The detective's eyes were on him, and the governor's and the warder's at the back. "She was on the bench. She was on the last row of seats. She sat either second or third from the judge, to his right. When he had pronounced sentence I noticed her rising and I noticed her remove her veil, and she looked at me, I have no doubt with the deliberate design of attracting my attention." "I believe I noticed the woman to whom you refer." This was the governor. The detective said nothing. He continued to look at the prisoner for a moment or two in silence. Then from a pocket in his coat he took an envelope.