One of the
disreputable companions of the murdered man confessed on his death-bed
that he had done the deed. There was nothing interesting or remarkable in
the circumstances. Chance which had put innocence in peril, had offered
impunity to guilt. An infamous woman; a jealous quarrel; and an absence
at the moment of witnesses on the spot--these were really the commonplace
materials which had composed the tragedy of Pardon's Piece.
CHAPTER THE NINTH
The Hero of the Trial
"You have forced it out of me. Now you have had your way, never mind my
feelings--Go!"
Those were the first words the Hero of the Trial said to me, when he was
able to speak again! He withdrew with a curious sullen resignation to the
farther end of the room. There he stood looking at me, as a man might
have looked who carried some contagion about him, and who wished to
preserve a healthy fellow-creature from the peril of touching him.
"Why should I go?" I asked.
"You are a bold woman," he said, "to remain in the same room with a man
who has been pointed at as a murderer, and who has been tried for his
life."
The same unhealthy state of mind which had brought him to Dimchurch, and
which had led him to speak to me as he had spoken on the previous
evening, was, as I understood it, now irritating him against me as a
person who had made his own quick temper the means of entrapping him into
letting out the truth.
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