"That the report of your being too ill to sit was a lie. You were not ill at all and never had been--the step-father knew better. You were merely shirking your duty to save your friend in some way. But that trick shouldn't succeed either, or the people should know what Judges in the Isle of Man were. So you see you must sit on this case, dear--if you are fit for it. You can't afford to have it said that you have sacrificed your duty as a Judge to your personal interests. At your first Court, too." Stowell was in torture. In spite of the Governor's warning, an almost overpowering impulse came to him to confess, to make a clean breast of everything, there and then, and once for all. "Fenella," he began (his breath was coming and going in gusts), "who knows if the guilty man is Gell? It may be somebody else." "Who else can it be?" He tried to say "It is I," but hesitated--he could not shatter in a word the whole world he lived in. At the next moment she was praising his fidelity, which would not allow him to think ill of his life-long friend. "But he has no such delicacy," she said. "Knowing what he knows he is still going to defend the girl, and that's equal to defending himself, isn't it? How shocking!" Stowell's shame at his moral cowardice reached the point of abasement, and he dropped his head. Then, carried away by her own pleading, Fenella put her arms about his neck, tenderly and caressingly, and told him she knew well what a hard thing she was asking him to do--to sit in judgment on his friend also, for that was what it would come to. But she would love him for ever if he would do it. It would be like the crown of all her hopes, the fulfilment of all she had worked for, if in some way (he would know best how) a poor girl who had sinned and suffered should have mercy shown to her, and not be left alone in her shame, but have the partner of her sin (no matter who he was or how near he came) standing side by side with her. There was a moment of silence. Stowell was like a man groping in the dark of a black midnight. At length a light seemed to dawn on him. If he sat on this case he could save an innocent man at all events. "You _will_ sit, will you not?" "Yes." And then she kissed him. III Back at Ballamoar, Stowell found the Deemster's clerk waiting for him. It had taken Joshua three days to see Deemster Taubman, and when at length he was admitted to the big man's presence he had found him in bed, with his shaggy head and unshaven face on the pillow and his lower extremities through the legs of a cane-bottomed chair which supported his bed-clothes. "What? What's that?" he had roared. "Sit at the General Gaol? Go back to your master and tell him I'm lying here in the tortures of the damned, not able to put a foot to the ground." Stowell drew a long breath. Fate had spoken its last word! It was now certain that he must sit on the case of Bessie Collister.