The placards worried Ronnie; they seemed to accentuate the forlornness of his cause. All through their hasty meal, snatched at a corner-table of the crowded chop-house, he felt himself growing more and more nervous, less and less confident of success. Spillcroft's conversation and Cartwright's irritated him. _Their_ interest was so coldly legal. They spoke of Lucy Towers, of himself and Brunton, as men who have betted well within their means speak of race-horses. "H. B.'ll have you on toast if he proves adultery," decided Spillcroft. "Do as you like, of course; but I shouldn't risk putting the woman in the box," urged Cartwright. "I should plead 'manslaughter' and have done with it." "Thanks for the suggestion," fumed Ronnie. "I thought I was being paid to _fight_." "Good for you! Try one of these." Cartwright, laughing, offered him a small cigar: "Nothing like tobacco for a fighting man." Smoking, Ronnie visualized Brunton, gray eyes staring, jowl a-twitch, teeth bit to the under lip; Brunton as he had seen him when Lucy Towers first entered the dock. And visualizing, realizing the shock that amazing likeness must have been, he could not help admiring the man. Brunton, startled at the very moment of tensest concentration, had yet managed to make the speech of his life, missing never a legal point in two hours of impassioned argument. How could he, the poor orator, compete with such a man; how prove any flaw in the "hanging prosecutor's" thesis that Lucy Towers, adulteress, shot her husband so that she might marry her paramour? "Ten minutes to two," said Cartwright, paying the bill. 5 Reëntering the crowded court, Ronnie saw that Brunton was already seated. The K.C., turning from conference with his junior, darted one look at his opponent; that same look, compound of fear and obstinacy, of injured pride and determination for revenge, of the weak man who knows himself in the wrong and means to persist in his wrong-doing, which Ronnie had noted on the day when he pleaded for Aliette's freedom. Forcibly the personal issue obtruded on Ronnie's mind; and he could not help speculating, as Mr. Justice Heber took his seat, whether that ermined figure, whose gleaming spectacles turned this way and that, to the police-sergeant reëntering the box, to the jury, to Henry Smith-Assher rising to continue his examination-in-chief, and lastly to the motionless woman in the dock, knew anything of the fight for another woman's freedom, of the private quarrel between counsel for the prosecution and counsel for the defense. "May we take it, then," Henry Smith-Assher fidgeted with the tapes round his bull-neck, "that the accused's statement was entirely voluntary?" "Entirely," answered the witness, obviously honest, and as obviously convinced of the prisoner's guilt. "Thank you, sergeant, that's all I have to ask you."