The reader may be surprised at the active pertinacity with which Williams pursued one on trial for her life; a class of persons with whom the bar usually professes to deal tenderly and in mercy. But the fact was that he had been specially retained by the next of kin, who had large expectations from the abstracted hoards of his aunt; and that the fashion of the day had enabled him to achieve such a _cent per cent_ bargain with his client, as caused his own compensation altogether to depend on the measure of his success. Should Mary Monson be sentenced to the gallows, it was highly probable her revelations would put the wronged in the way of being righted, when this limb of the law would, in all probability, come in for a full share of the recovered gold. How different all this was from the motives and conduct of Dunscomb, the reader will readily perceive; for, while the profession in this country abounds with Williams’s and Timms’s, men of the highest tone of feeling, the fairest practice, and the clearest perceptions of what is right, are by no means strangers to the bar. CHAPTER XVIII. “Thou hast already racked me with thy stay; Therefore require me not to ask thee twice: Reply at once to all. What is concluded?” _Mourning Bride._ During the interval between the occurrence of the scene in court that has just been related, and the appearance of Dunscomb at Biberry, the community was rapidly taking sides on the subject of the guilt or innocence of Mary Monson. The windows of the gaol were crowded all day; throngs collecting there to catch glimpses of the extraordinary female, who was rightly enough reported to be living in a species of luxury in so unusual a place, and who was known to play on an instrument that the popular mind was a good deal disposed to regard as sacred. As a matter of course, a hundred stories were in circulation, touching the character, history, sayings and doings of this remarkable person, that had no foundation whatever in truth; for it is an infirmity of human nature to circulate and place its belief in falsehoods of this sort; and more especially of human nature as it is exhibited in a country where care has been taken to stimulate the curiosity of the vulgar, without exactly placing them in a condition to appease its longings, either intelligently or in a very good taste.