It became his painful duty, he said, to prosecute one of the most extraordinary cases that the annals of English crime had ever recorded before an English tribunal. The prisoner at the bar was known—either personally, or by fame, to most persons there present. She had been a lady by birth, wealth and education, holding position among the highest in the realm; a lady distinguished for rank and fortune, celebrated for her exceeding beauty and accomplished genius; _such she had been_. Now, alas! she was no less distinguished for her discovered depravity, daring and duplicity! They knew that she had been successful in fashionable, aristocratic, and even in royal circles; he would now show that she had, until recently, been equally successful in her course of concealed guilt. He would give a synopsis of her career, stating facts that he should prove by competent witnesses present in this court. He should commence with her school life, showing the gentlemen of the jury the precocious depravity with which at the early age of fourteen she had deceived her fond, indulgent parents, deluded her excellent teacher, and ensnared a young gentleman into a secret marriage, soon as lightly broken as it had been made; the wantonness with which she had abandoned her youthful bridegroom, driving him to despair and desperation, that soon ended in the wreck of his fortune and character; the duplicity with which through ten long years she had concealed the fact of her first marriage from her parents and friends; and the wickedness with which she had, just one month since, entrapped the heart and hand of a noble lord here present, and who was the second victim of this modern Messalina! At this degrading peroration, the blood rushed to Lord Montressor’s brow—he started forward with a flashing eye and a raised hand—but, then recollecting himself and his surroundings, he made a powerful effort, controlled himself, and with the air of a man who bides his time, retreated to his stand. Estelle, a novice to the forms and usages of courts of law, heard all the enormous charges, the atrocious wickedness officially imputed to her by the prosecutor, and sat, with pallid features and fixed stare, like a woman appalled to marble. Lord Dazzleright stooped and spoke to her. “You should know, Lady Montressor, that this is merely an _official_ tirade, a professional affair—it means nothing, makes no impression. The Judge don’t believe him, the jury don’t believe him, he don’t believe himself. He is only repeating the prosecutor’s usual raw-head and bloody bones formula of— ‘Fe, faw, fum—I smell the blood of an Englishman.’ No more than just that.”