The Duke of Hereward bore the searching glare quite calmly.  He simply leaned back in his chair, with folded arms and attentive face, on which curiosity was the only expression.

“Mr. Keir,” said the venerable Counsellor Guthrie, of the defence, “is all this supposed to concern the case before the jury?”

“Ay, does it!” cried Rose Cameron, before the lawyer addressed could reply.  “Ay, does it, as ye will sune see, gin ye will gie me leave to speak.”

Meanwhile the Duke of Hereward took out his note-book and wrote these lines: 

“Pray let the witness proceed without regard to her use of my name.  I think the ends of justice require that she be suffered to give her testimony in her own way.  HEREWARD.”

He tore this leaf out and passed it on to Mr. Guthrie, who read it with some surprise, and then waved his hand to Mr. Keir, and sat down with the air of a man who had complied with an indiscreet request, and washed his hands of the consequences.

“The time of the court is being unnecessarily wasted.  Let the examination of the witness go on,” said the presiding judge.

“It shall, my lord,” answered the Queen’s Counsel, with an inclination of his white-wigged head.  Then turning to the bold blonde on the stand, he proceeded: 

“Witness, tell the jury what occurred that night under the balcony of Miss Levison’s apartments at Castle Lone.”

Rose Cameron threw another vindictive glance at the Duke of Hereward, and commenced her narrative.

Now, as her story was substantially the same that has been already given to the reader, it is not necessary to recapitulate it here.  Only in one respect it differed from the stories she had hitherto told to her landlady or housekeeper, Mrs. Brown, of Westminster Road; as on this occasion she reserved all allusion to any real or fancied marriage between herself and the nobleman she claimed as her lover, and then accused as the accomplice of thieves and assassins, in the murder and robbery at Castle Lone, on the night preceding the day appointed for his own marriage with its heiress!

It would be impossible to describe the effect of this terrible testimony on the minds of all who heard it.

The Bench, the Bar, and the Jury, whom, it would seem, nothing in this world had power to startle, astonish, or discompose, sat like statues.

Scarcely less immovable was the young Duke of Hereward, the subject of this awful charge, who sat back in his seat with an air of grave curiosity, and with the composure of a man who was master of the situation.

But the crowd which filled the court-room seemed utterly confounded by what they heard.  Upon the whole, they either disbelieved this witness, or distrusted their own ears.  Their young laird, as she called the present duke, was their model of all wisdom, goodness, magnanimity.  Truly, they had heard a rumor of some little love-making between the young laird and a handsome shepherdess at Ben Lone, probably this same Rose Cameron; even these rumors they did not fully credit; but that the noble young Duke of Hereward should be the accomplice of thieves and murderers in the robbery at Castle Lone, and the assassination of Sir Lemuel Levison, on the very night preceding the morning appointed for his marriage with Sir Lemuel’s daughter!