To say that Ephraim Judd was not troubled in his mind by the part he had played--or, as he preferred to put it to himself, had been compelled to play--at the inquest, and subsequently at the trial of John Brancker, would be to do him scant justice indeed. Circumstances--of his own bringing about, it is true--had so conspired against him that only one of two alternatives remained open to him: he must either tell what he knew, and thereby bring about his own ruin, or otherwise, by keeping silent, help to brand his best friend with the stigma of a most heinous crime. He was a moral coward, and when the crucial moment came, his courage failed him. He allowed John Brancker to go to his trial, when a dozen words spoken by him would have gone far towards his exculpation. Like Edward Hazeldine, he told himself that, should John be found guilty, then, at that extreme moment, he would unburden himself of his secret, let the consequences to himself be what they might. As it fell out, however, neither he nor Edward were called upon to make any such sacrifice. But not only had Ephraim kept silent when it behoved him to speak; he had done worse than that; in a moment of weakness he had perjured himself--he had sworn to a lie. The Coroner had asked him whether he had seen Mr. Brancker leave the Bank after the latter had entered it to obtain possession of his umbrella, and he had replied that he had not; whereas the fact was that he had remained lurking no great way off, until he had seen John quit the Bank not more than three or four minutes later. Since then, to make matters worse, from the ruin he had tacitly helped to bring about there had come to him both preferment and a liberal increase of salary. Small wonder was it that the young bank clerk was a most unhappy man. On a certain Saturday evening towards the end of January, Ephriam was sent for to the house of Mr. Hoskins, the pastor of the Ashdown Templetonians. There he found John Iredale, an elderly man, a cabinetmaker by trade, one of his co-religionists, and the leader of the choir. Mr. Hoskins had slipped on the ice, and had sprained his ankle so severely that it would be impossible for him to leave the house for several days to come, and his object in sending for Iredale and Judd was that between them they should conduct the service on the morrow in lieu of himself. The former was to take charge of the preliminary part of it, and the latter to deliver one of those discourses for which his name was already so favorably known.