"Your lordship says," he observed at length, "that the evidence is too clear. It is certainly clear enough to justify great and serious apprehensions, but not to take away hope, or to impede exertion. I remember having heard of an instance which occurred in far distant climates, where the causes for supposing a person dead were much more conclusive than in the present instance. A sailor had left the ship to which he belonged, and wandered on shore in a place infested with pirates. He did not return. Boats were sent after him, and in tracing the course of one of the rivers up which he was supposed to have taken his way, his clothes were found bloody, torn, and cut with the blows of a sword: a leathern purse, which he was known to have carried full of money, was found further on, devoid of its contents; and further still, a mangled and mutilated body, in which almost all his comrades declared they recognised his corpse; and yet, three years after that, he rejoined the ship to which he belonged, having made his escape from the party of robbers by whom he had been taken. The body which had been found was that of another man, though the clothes and the purse undoubtedly were his own." While he spoke, the Earl turned deadly pale, gazed upon him for a moment or two with a straining eye, then suddenly started up, and without a word of reply quitted the room. Langford at first seemed surprised, but smiled slightly as he saw him go: then calmly sat down at the table, took up the papers which the Earl had left behind him, read over the evidence against himself, and wrote in the margin a number of observations, wherever any strained or unjust conclusion seemed to have been drawn by the magistrates. He had been occupied in this manner about an hour, when the Earl again made his appearance. His manner was very different from what it had been on the previous occasion. There was a want of that fierce energy which had before characterised it; there was a doubtfulness, a hesitation, and a vagueness, quite opposed to the keen, sharp decision of his former demeanour. He treated Langford more as an acquaintance, more even as a friend, than as a prisoner. Two or three times he spoke of the chances of his son being still alive, and referred vaguely to the story which Langford had told him, but then darted off suddenly to something else.