Within earshot a perspiring young pressman was informing his friends that to come there comfortably you should commit the murder yourself, then they gave you the Royal Box; but his teeth could be heard chattering through the feeble felicity.  The white-headed listener curled a contemptuous nostril.  They could joke, and yet they could feel!  He himself betrayed neither weakness, but sat waiting patiently and idly listening, with the same grim jaw and the same inscrutable eye with which he had watched the prisoner and the jury alternately throughout the week.  And when the latter at last returned, and then the former, it was the same subtle stare that he again bent upon them both in turn.

The jury had been absent but forty minutes after all; and their expedition seemed as ill an omen as their nervous and responsible faces.  There was a moment’s hush, another moment of prophetic murmurs, and then a stillness worthy of its subsequent description in every newspaper.  The prisoner was standing in the front of the dock, a female warder upon either hand.  The lightning pencil of the new journalist had its will of her at last.  For Mrs. Minchin had dispensed not only with the chair which she had occupied all the week, but also with the heavy veil which she had but partially lifted during her brief sojourn in the witness-box, and never once in the dock.  The veil was now flung back over the widow’s bonnet, peaking and falling like a sable cowl, against which the unearthly pallor of her face was whiter far then that of the merely dead, just as mere death was the least part of the fate confronting her.  Yet she had raised her veil to look it fairly in the face, and the packed assembly marvelled as it gazed.

Was that the face that had been hidden from them all these days?  It was not what they had pictured beneath the proud, defiant carriage of its concealing veil.  Was that the face of a determined murderess?

Beautiful it was not as they saw it then, but the elements of beauty lay unmistable beneath a white mist of horror and of pain, as a lovely landscape is still lovely at its worst.  The face was a thin but perfect oval, lengthened a little by depth of chin and height of forehead, as now also by unnatural emaciation and distress.  The mouth was at once bloodless, sweet, and firm; the eyes of a warm and lustrous brown, brilliant, eloquent, brave—­and hopeless!

Yes, she had no hope herself!  It was plain enough at the first glimpse of the deadly white, uncovered face, in the cruel glare of gas.  But it became plainer still as, with sad, unflinching eyes, she watched and listened while, for the last time, the jurymen answered to their names.

Now they were done.  The foreman shifted nervously in his place.  In the overstain of the last dread pause, the crowded court felt hotter and lighter than ever.  It seemed to unite the glare of a gin palace with the temperature of a Turkish bath.

“Gentlemen, are you greed upon your verdict?”