Whether it would have had any effect on the jury can now be only a matter of conjecture. There is this to be said of it, however, that it fits in with the medical evidence, for it suggests a struggle, and the medical evidence of the abrasions suggests a struggle. It fits in, also, with all we know of Alma Tirtschke’s nature. The fact must be faced that, if the Matthews confession is true, the girl was not what her relatives believed her. She boldly went to Ross, and boldly remained in Ross’s saloon for three hours, like a pert and forward youngster, not to put it any further. If it comes to a choice, most people will prefer to think of the child as good and innocent and retiring, rather than to accept anything to the contrary which comes unsupported from the lips of Ivy Matthews. If the Harding confession is accepted the matter is very little better, for you then have the girl walking deliberately back into the Arcade after she was seen in Little Collins Street by the Youngs, accepting the invitation of a stranger to come into his wine saloon, and taking wine at his hands—wine of which no trace could be found when the stomach was opened less than eighteen hours afterwards. The attractive feature of Graham’s evidence, if the screams he heard were connected with Alma Tirtschke, is that it allows us to think of the little girl as we would all like to think of her—pure, innocent, and modest. That little girl met her death, in all human probability, within a few minutes of the time she was last seen alive by the Youngs, she met it in some place which was much handier to Gun Alley than Ross’s wine saloon, and she met it in a house provided with a fireplace or other conveniences for disposing of incriminating evidence. If anyone would like to see one other improbability in connection with the Crown case against Ross, he should visit the Little Collins Street entrance of the Arcade by night, and ask himself whether it is likely that any man would carry the dead body of a murdered child such a long distance up a brilliantly lighted thoroughfare even at 1 o’clock in the morning. [Illustration] APPENDIX. During the progress of the trial numberless letters, anonymous and bearing signatures, were received by Ross’s legal advisers. They were of all classes—helpful criticism, incoherent comment, threatening, laudatory, and censorious. One received on the eve of Ross’s execution, with a covering note asking that it should be handed to him, and saying that it would have been sent direct only the writer had doubts whether the prison regulations would allow Ross to get it, bore on its face some suggestion of genuineness. No one, of course, can say definitely, but the letter may perhaps be given as possessing some public interest. The envelope bore the postmark of a small country town, but there was nothing otherwise to indicate whence or from whom it came. With the elision of a sentence or two, rather Zola-esque for publication, it was as follows:—