Gossips who attended the trial said it was precious little good she did the fellow. His conviction was a foregone conclusion. A solicitor with an eye to possibilities who attended Hunt during the police court proceedings learnt from him that he had been in Lady Burdon's service from boyhood and (in his own phrase) promptly "touched her" to see if she would undertake the expenses of a defence. Her reply was in a form to send him pretty sharply about his business and (a man of some humour) he thanked her courteously by having her subpoeaned on the prisoner's behalf--mitigation of sentence was to be earned by her testimony to the young man's irreproachable character during his long years in her service. It was little of such testimony she gave. Angry at the trick played on her (as she considered it), angry at being dragged into a case of sordid aspect and of local sensation, she went angrier yet into the witness-box for the scene made at her expense by the prisoner as she passed the dock. The newspaper reporter who described him as presenting the appearance of a wild animal trapped, wrote of him as having a wolfish air as he glared about him--of his jaws that worked ceaselessly, of his blinking eyelids, and of the perspiration that streamed like raindrops down his face. As Lady Burdon passed him the emotions of the public were thrilled to see his arms come suppliant over the dock rail and to hear him scream to her: "Say a word for me, me lady! Say a good word for me! Love o' God, say--" A warder's rough hand jerked his cry out of utterance, and he listened to her during her evidence, watching her with that wolfish air of his and with those jaws ceaselessly at work. A cold 'un, the gossips said of her when she stepped down. The Judge in passing his stereotyped form of sentence made more seemly reference to her testimony. "The evidence," the judge addressed the prisoner, "of your former employer--come here reluctantly but with the best will in the world (as she has told us) to befriend you--has only been able to show that you have exhibited from your boyhood upward the traits--sullenness of temper, hatred of authority--that have led you directly to the place where now you stand. It has been made very clear that this crime--only by the mercy of God prevented from taking a more serious form--was wilful, premeditated, of a sort into which your whole character shows you might have been expected to burst at almost any period of your maturer years. You will be sent away now where you will have leisure, as I sincerely trust, to reflect and to repent.... Five years.... You will go to penal servitude for that term."