His luck only added to his fears. Had it not been for the two anonymous notes, Maggie Peterson's evidence would have stood unchallenged. Now he could smash that evidence. But even now---even if the jury believed _his_ side of the case sufficiently to discount Brunton's plea of premeditation--even if Bob Fielding and Lucy came well through the ordeal of Brunton's cross-questions--how, how the devil could he hope, unless some miracle gave his halting oratory genius, to secure a complete acquittal? Lunching alone in the crowded grill-room of the South-Eastern & Chatham Hotel, Ronnie's thoughts went back to other days. He saw himself soldier again, and remembered the particular type of moral courage, of self-control, necessary for the winning of battles. That moral courage, that self-control must be his again if he would win this fight against Brunton. "This is my chance," he thought. "My one chance of downing the brute. I mustn't muff it." Gradually solitude restored his balance. Gradually, his mind reconcentrated. Weeks of thought crystallized to short sentences. Lucy, Lucy Towers must be saved. Nothing but that mattered. The personal issue dwindled to unimportance. Walking back to the court, he found that he could think, even of his enemy, logically. 2 But when, a few minutes later, Ronald Cavendish, rising to open the defense of Lucy Towers, saw Hector Brunton bowed over his brief, nothing of him visible except a patch of gray wig, the hump of a black back, and one gentlemanly hand clutched round the gold pencil-case--then, for a moment, logic failed; and only the fear-stricken eyes of the woman in the dock, only his personal enmity for the man keyed him to the struggle. "M' lord, members of the jury," he began, and there was no attempt at oratory in his beginning, "it will be no part of my case to prove to you that Lucy Towers did not shoot her husband. She did shoot him. She shot him exactly as counsel for the Crown has proved to you. But when the Crown asks you to find my client guilty of wilful murder, when my learned friend brings what he is pleased to call evidence in support of malice and of premeditation; then I join issue with him. My submission to you is that there was, in what my client did, neither malice nor premeditation. "Yet even if my learned friend fails--as it seems to me he must fail--to convince you of premeditation, that failure will not furnish me with sufficient grounds on which to ask you for my client's complete exoneration. Only on one ground can I ask you, as I intend to ask you, for your verdict of not guilty; and that ground, members of the jury, is justifiable or excusable homicide.