The winter is over. There were pleasant cheery times again at Woodburn Grange, at Hillmartin Hall, and at Cotmanhaye Manor. There were splendid dinners at Christmas; and many a one that we know seated at them; and faces as joyous as could be at the after games and dances. There were all the Woodburns, but with some of them also under other names. Mrs. Letty Thorsby, and fair Ann of Cotmanhaye Manor, and their loving husbands, and the worthy Thomas Clavering, as fond of a rubber at whist as ever. Ah, it was a bright, happy, prosperous gathering and intergathering, after dark days and very strange events. But winter is over, and March assizes have arrived. When Hopcraft was brought into court and placed in the dock, all those who had known him at Woodburn were astonished at the change in his appearance. Instead of that thick, full-fed person, and sun-burnt hue, he was become thin, sickly, and feeble-looking. He gazed about him, on the judge, the barristers, and the crowd, with a frightened stare. The fact was that he had suffered in his health from the constant terror under which he lived so long as Scammel was at large; but since he had been in prison, he had been the victim of another fear, that of the certainty of being hanged. His poor stupid intellect could make no distinction in a general fact. He had always heard murder and hanging linked together in conversation; and he could imagine nothing from his having been implicated in a murder, and present at it, but being hanged for it. Though he contended that he was totally innocent of any intention of assisting Scammel in the dreadful deed, had warned him against perpetrating it, and was greatly surprised at the deed he said, and probably quite truly; yet he had been seen by the Shalcrosses helping to fling the murdered man into the river, and consenting to share the money with the murderer. This he himself had admitted to the magistrates, and this was the vulture that all through the winter was gnawing at his heart. He was in at the murder, and he must hang for it. A word which the magistrates used had also greatly alarmed him. He had heard one of them say that he was accessory. To his ignorant imagination this presented itself as something direful and ominous. He had soon forgotten, if he ever clearly caught the pronunciation, and it had metamorphosed itself in his mind to “raxery.” He sat in his cell calling himself a “raxery,” and believing that it sealed his fate. He ventured once or twice to ask the turnkey what a raxery meant; and on his shaking his head, and saying he did not know, he was still more convinced that it meant something very like condemned, and the man, therefore, would not tell him.