"Besides," she said, "the jury will recommend you to mercy, and then the Judges will exercise their discretionary power to reduce your punishment." Bessie's eyes began to shine. "You must really forgive me .... And Alick--do you think Alick will forgive me too?" "Yes, when he sees that what you did was done out of your love for him." "How good you are! .... And shall we be able to leave the Isle of Man and go away somewhere?" "Perhaps .... some day." "Oh, how good you are! I don't know what I've done for you to be so good to me. I didn't think anybody except a girl's mother could be so good to her." She was like a child again. Her face, though still wet, was beaming. In the selfishness of her suffering it had not occurred to her before that her comforter had been suffering also, but now, in some vague way, she became aware of it. "If they ask me who he was," she said, in a whisper (meaning who had been her fellow-sinner), "I'll never tell them--never!" Fenella's humiliation was abject. "When we go back to Court," she said, "you must be brave, whatever happens." "Will you let me hold your hand?" said Bessie. And Fenella, scarcely able to speak, answered, "Yes." In the Deemster's room there was a painful silence. The Clerk of the Rolls was under the deeply-recessed window, turning over the crinkling folios of the Depositions in the case to be taken next. The Governor, stretched out in the leathern bound armchair before the empty fireplace, was smoking hard and trying to justify himself to his own conscience. Stowell was sitting at the end of the long table, with his head in his hands, gazing down at the red blotting-pad in front of him. No one spoke. Occasionally there came from without the mournful cry of the gulls flying over the harbour, and, at one moment, the ululation of a crew of Irish sailors who were weighing anchor on a schooner in the bay. The profound silence around only made louder the thunder in Stowell's soul. He knew he was at the crisis of his life. On what he did now the future of his life depended. The address to the Jury had been a fearful ordeal, but the sentence would be terrible. To sentence Bessie Collister, having been the first cause of her crime--could he do it? It might only be a formal sentence (the Crown being certain to commute the punishment), but the awful words prescribed by the Statute--would they not choke in his very throat? And then Fenella! Her voice was ringing in his ears still: "Shame on him! Let no good man own him for a friend! Let no good woman take him for a husband!" "And what will be the end?" he asked himself. He heard the door open behind him. A low hum of voices came down the staircase from the Court-house. There was a footstep on the carpeted floor. Somebody by his side was speaking. It was Joshua Scarff. "The Jury are ready to return to Court, your Honour." IV