“We are.”

“Do you find the prisoner guilty or not guilty?”

“Not guilty.”

There was a simultaneous gasp from a hundred throats—­a distinct cry from some.  Then the Clerk of Arraigns was seen to be leaning forward, a hand to his ear, for the foreman’s voice had broken with excitement.  And every soul in court leaned forward too.

But this time his feelings had a different effect upon the excited foreman.

“Not guilty!” he almost bawled.

Dead silence then, while the clock ticked thrice.

“And that is the verdict of you all?”

“Of every one of us!”

The judge leant back in his place, his eyes upon the desk before him, without a movement or a gesture to strike the personal note which had been suppressed with such admirable impartiality throughout the trial.  But it was several moments before his eyes were lifted with his voice.

“Let her be discharged,” was all he said even then; but he would seem to have said it at once gruffly, angrily, thankfully, disgustedly, with emotion, and without any emotion at all.  You read the papers, and you take your choice.

So Rachel Minchin was supported from the court before the round eyes of a hundred or two of her fellow-creatures, in the pitiable state of one who has been condemned to die, and not set free to live.  It was as though she still misunderstood a verdict which had filled most faces with incredulity, but none with an astonishment to equal her own.  Her white face had leaped alight, but not with gladness.  The pent-up emotion of the week had broken forth in an agony of tears; and so they half led, half carried her from the court.  She had entered it for the last time with courage enough; but it was the wrong kind of courage; and, for the one supreme moment, sentence of life was harder to bear than sentence of death.

In a few minutes the court was empty—­a singular little theatre of pale varnish and tawdry hangings, still rather snug and homely in the heat and light of its obsolete gas, and with as little to remind one of the play as any other theatre when the curtain is down and the house empty.  But there was clamor in the corridors, and hooting already in the street.  Nor was the house really empty after all.  One white-haired gentleman had not left his place when an attendant returned to put out the lights.  The attendant pointed him out to a constable at the door; both watched him a few moments.  Then the attendant stepped down and touched him on the shoulder.

The gentleman turned slowly without a start.  “Ah, you’re the man I want to see,” said he.  “Was that the Chief Warder in the dock?”

“Him with the beard,” said the attendant, nodding.

“Well, give him this, and give it him quick.  I’ll wait up there till he can see me.”

And he pressed his card into the attendant’s palm, with a couple of sovereigns underneath.