whimsically that some ancestress of his had been a housemaid to the Borgias, and had got into rather distinguished “trouble.” But she must have been a housemaid. I did not, however, say this to any one during the trial; for I was sure that his passion was perfectly unpractical, and that he took action only in his mild moments. I found, as I say, that I could not write plays. My wife and I went abroad for some years. We saw Upcher act once in London, but I didn’t even look him up. That gives you the measure of our detachment. I had quite forgotten him in the succeeding years of desultory, delightful roaming over southern Europe. There are alike so much to remember and so much to forget, between Pirene and Lourdes! But the first head-lines of the first newspaper that I bought on the dock, when we disembarked reluctantly in New York, presented him to me again. It was all there: the “horror,” the “case,” the vulgar, garish tragedy. We had landed in the thick of it. It took me some time to grasp the fact that a man whom I had occasionally called by his first name was being accused of that kind of thing. I don’t need to dot my i’s. You had all seen Filippo Upcher act, and you all, during his trial, bought the _Orb_. I read it myself--every sickening column that had been, with laborious speed, jotted down in the court-room. The evidence made one feel that, if this was murder, a man who merely shoots his wife through the heart need not be considered a criminal at all. It was the very scum of crime. Rachel Upcher had disappeared after a violent quarrel with her husband, in which threats--overheard--had been freely uttered. He could give no plausible account of her. Then the whole rotten mass of evidence--fit only for a rag-picker to handle--began to come in. The mutilated body disinterred; the fragments of marked clothing; the unused railway ticket--but I really cannot go into it. I am not an _Orb_ reporter. The evidence was only circumstantial, but it was, alack! almost better than direct testimony. Filippo was perfectly incoherent in defence, though he, of course, pleaded “not guilty.” He had, for that significant scene--he, Filippo Upcher!--no stage presence.