“We must move heaven and earth, Gerard. He is your second self. If he should--if anything should happen to him--he would be with us always, reproaching us with his dead eyes for not saving him. I owe him your life, my beloved--and mine--for without you I should die--Gerard, dear.” She was a little excited, spoke a trifle shrilly. Gerard unclasped his hands and bent forward. Interpreting the gesture according to her heart, she knelt and swiftly closed his arms around her, and nestled close to him. “You may be sure I shall do all I can,” he said. She closed her eyes. The man’s calm strength of voice, the hidden strength of his frame reassured her fears. “Forgive me for doubting while you are here to save him,” she murmured, in her blind faith. A few moments later some domestic duty summoned her away. Gerard rose, and stretched himself and yawned. “Oh, damn!” he said, irritably. Then, lighting his pipe, he strode out the house, and tramped along the Heath Road, with the air of a man who is justifying to himself a series of expletives. ***** The week expired. Hugh was again brought before the magistrates and committed for trial. The key turned in the cell-door in Holloway Gaol, and he was left alone for the night. In a state of semi-sanity he abandoned himself to the ghastly panorama of the day, as it passed and repassed in incoherent fragments before his eyes. He was prostrate with fatigue and strain, utterly brain-weary, incapable of lucid arrangement of ideas, almost of calculating the weight of the evidence against him. Fresh facts had been brought to light. The butler had heard him speak in angry tones when he had entered the room with the spirit-tray. The entry in Israel’s private ledger assigning the stolen deed-box as the depository of the £5,000 security had been confirmed by the confidential clerk. Moreover, the empty box had been discovered, broken open, in the trunk of a hollow tree in the wood behind The Lindens. The prisoner had returned with a mysterious parcel of which he could give no account. On searching his rooms after arrest, the police had found the grate full of scrupulously reduced paper-ash. The inference was that this ash represented the stolen bond. It was another instance of the irony that marked this extraordinary freak of circumstances. Even his careful destruction of Minna’s letters and all memorials of her was turned into evidence against him. Medical testimony placed one o’clock and five as the extreme limits between which the murder could possibly have been committed. Probabilities pointed to three o’clock.