It seemed, as the Clerk pursued his reading, that he was slowly unfolding mesh by mesh a hideous web, in the midst of which the presence of a death-dealing and loathsome spider could as yet only be dimly guessed. A close, clinging web from which no man, be he the premier peer of England or the humblest commoner, could ever hope to escape. The web of a rough and misguided justice, of a law of the talion, retributive and blind, distributing with an impartial hand condemnations and punishments to guilty and innocent alike, to the martyr and to the felon, to the coward and the deceived. This was not a decadent, puny century, peopled with neurotics and feeble-minded weaklings, it was a century of men!--men who were giants alike in their virtues and their passions, their vices and their atrocities, narrow in their views, but staunch in their beliefs, savage in their creeds and prejudices--but MEN for all that. "The more heinous the offence the less chance shall the prisoner have of justifying his conduct." That was the dictate of the law. "For truly," said Sir Robert Catline, Lord Chief Justice of England, in the course of the trial of Sir Nicholas Throckmorton for high treason, "justice must not be confused by sundry arguments in the prisoner's cause, which might lead to his acquittal and the non-punishment of so grave a fault." Witnesses were seldom, if ever, examined in the presence of the accused. Depositions were extorted--often by torture, always by threats--from persons who happened to be friends or associates of the prisoner. An acquittal?--perish the thought! Let the citizen look to himself ere he fell in the clutches of his country's justice; once there he had little or no chance of proving his innocence. Lest the guilty escape! Always that awful possibility! Rough justice demanded punishment--always punishment--lest the guilty escape! And the people as they listened knew that they had come to see a man's last day upon earth. Proud, rich, fastidious Wessex! this is the end of all things! Pomp and ceremony, gorgeous robes and costly apparels! these to speed thee on thy way; but as inevitably as the dull winter's night must follow this grey November morning, so will pomp and circumstance fade away into the past and leave thee with but one red-clad figure by thy side--that of the headsman with the axe. Justice to-day could make short work of her duties. Robert d'Esclade, fifth Duke of Wessex, had confessed to his crime, why should Justice trouble herself to prove that which was already admitted? She had merely to think out the form and severity of the punishment for this man of high degree, who had sunk and stooped so low. For form's sake a few depositions had been taken, for this was an unusual event--a specially atrocious crime! the murder of a foreign envoy at the Court of the Queen of England, and at the hand of the premier peer of the realm!