After that he had walked home through the little sleeping town to his house in the middle of a cobweb of streets at the back of the beach. Opening the door (it had been left on the latch for him) he had bolted it on the inside, and then going to the bedroom and finding his young wife in bed, with a frightened look under a timid smile, he had charged her with her unchastity, compelled her to confess to it, and then strangled her to death with his big hands--the marks of his broad thumbs, black with tar, being on her throat and bosom. In the middle of the night the fishermen who lived in the streets nearest to the harbour, awakened by a red glow in their bedrooms, had said to their wives: "What for are they burning the gorse on Peel hill at this time of the year?" But others, who were neighbours of Morrison's, having heard cries from his house in the night, had gathered in front of his door in the morning, and, getting no answer to their knocking, had burst it open and found the woman lying dead on the bed and the man huddled up on the floor at the foot of it. And when they had pushed him and roused him he had lifted his haggard face and said, "I've killed my sweetheart." Such was the fisherman's story, and when the defence had concluded their case, asking for an acquittal on the ground of unbearable moral provocation, and saying that never could there have been better grounds for the application of the unwritten law, the Jury was obviously impressed, and somebody at the back of the court was saying, "If they hang him for that they'll hang a man for anything." Against this sympathy for the accused, Stowell had risen to make his reply for the Crown. He did not deny the dead woman's transgression. It was true that she must have known when she married the prisoner that she was about to become the mother of a child by another man. But if that moral fact could be urged against the wife, was there nothing of the same kind that could be advanced in her favour? She had been cruelly betrayed and abandoned. Looking to the future she had seen the contempt of her little world before her. What had happened? In the dark hour of her desertion the prisoner had come with the offer of his love and protection. It was in evidence that for a time she had held back and that he had pressed himself upon her. None could know the secret of the dead woman's soul, but was it unreasonable to think that standing between the two fires of public scorn and the prisoner's affection she had said to herself, as poor misguided women in like cases did every day: "He loves me so much that he will forgive me whatever happens." But had he forgiven her? No, he had killed her, wilfully, cruelly, brutally, not in the heat of blood, but after long deliberation--he, the big powerful brute and she the weak, helpless, half-naked woman--the woman who had been faithful to him since the day he married her, the woman he had sworn to love and cherish until death parted them.