Lord Maxwell’s concern was evident.  In the first place, he was painfully, unexpectedly struck by the change in the speaker.  Why, what had Aldous been about?  So thin! so frail and willowy in her black dress—­monstrous!

“My dear,” he said, walking up to her and laying a fatherly hand on her shoulder, “my dear, I wish I could make you understand how gladly I would do this, or anything else, for you, if I honourably could.  I would do it for your sake and for your grandfather’s sake.  But—­this is a matter of conscience, of public duty, both for Aldous and myself.  You will not surely wish even, that we should be governed in our relations to it by any private feeling or motive?”

“No, but I have had no opportunity of speaking to you about it—­and I take such a different view from Aldous.  He knows—­everybody must know—­that there is another side, another possible view from that which the judge took.  You weren’t in court to-day, were you, at all?”

“No.  But I read all the evidence before the magistrates with great care, and I have just talked over the crucial points with Aldous, who followed everything to-day, as you know, and seems to have taken special note of Mr. Wharton’s speeches.”

“Aldous!”—­her voice broke irrepressibly into another note—­“I thought he would have let me speak to you first!—­to-night!”

Lord Maxwell, looking quickly at his grandson, was very sorry for him.  Aldous bent over her chair.

“You remember,” he said, “you sent down the petition.  I thought that meant that we were to read and discuss it.  I am very sorry.”

She tried to command herself, pressing her hand to her brow.  But already she felt the irrevocable, and anger and despair were rising.

“The whole point lies in this,” she said, looking up:  “Can we believe Hurd’s own story?  There is no evidence to corroborate it.  I grant that—­the judge did not believe it—­and there is the evidence of hatred.  But is it not possible and conceivable all the same?  He says that he did not go out with any thought whatever of killing Westall, but that when Westall came upon him with his stick up, threatening and abusing him, as he had done often before, in a fit of wild rage he shot at him.  Surely, surely that is conceivable?  There is—­there must be a doubt; or, if it is murder, murder done in that way is quite, quite different from other kinds and degrees of murder.”

Now she possessed herself.  The gift of flowing persuasive speech which was naturally hers, which the agitations, the debates of these weeks had been maturing, came to her call.  She leant forward and took up the petition.  One by one she went through its pleas, adding to them here and there from her own knowledge of Hurd and his peasant’s life—­presenting it all clearly, with great intellectual force, but in an atmosphere of emotion, of high pity, charged throughout with the “tears of things.”