Several other familiars of the prisoner gave more or less reluctant testimony as to his sometime prejudice against the amateur rival labour leader.  His expressions of dislike had been strong and bitter.  The prosecution also produced a poster announcing that the prisoner would preside at a great meeting of clerks on December 4th.  He had not turned up at this meeting nor sent any explanation.  Finally, there was the evidence of the detectives who originally arrested him at Liverpool Docks in view of his suspicious demeanour.  This completed the case for the prosecution.

Sir CHARLES BROWN-HARLAND, Q.C., rose with a swagger and a rustle of his silk gown, and proceeded to set forth the theory of the defence.  He said he did not purpose to call many witnesses.  The hypothesis of the prosecution was so inherently childish and inconsequential, and so dependent upon a bundle of interdependent probabilities that it crumbled away at the merest touch.  The prisoner’s character was of unblemished integrity, his last public appearance had been made on the same platform with Mr. Gladstone, and his honesty and highmindedness had been vouched for by statesmen of the highest standing.  His movements could be accounted for from hour to hour—­and those with which the prosecution credited him rested on no tangible evidence whatever.  He was also credited with superhuman ingenuity and diabolical cunning of which he had shown no previous symptom.  Hypothesis was piled on hypothesis, as in the old Oriental legend, where the world rested on the elephant and the elephant on the tortoise.  It might be worth while, however, to point out that it was at least quite likely that the death of Mr. Constant had not taken place before seven, and as the prisoner left Euston Station at 7.15 A.M. for Liverpool, he could certainly not have got there from Bow in the time; also that it was hardly possible for the prisoner, who could prove being at Euston Station at 5.25 A.M., to travel backwards and forwards to Glover Street and commit the crime all within less than two hours.  “The real facts,” said Sir Charles, impressively, “are most simple.  The prisoner, partly from pressure of work, partly (he had no wish to conceal) from worldly ambition, had begun to neglect Miss Dymond, to whom he was engaged to be married.  The man was but human, and his head was a little turned by his growing importance.  Nevertheless, at heart he was still deeply attached to Miss Dymond.  She, however, appears to have jumped to the conclusion that he had ceased to love her, that she was unworthy of him, unfitted by education to take her place side by side with him in the new spheres to which he was mounting—­that, in short, she was a drag on his career.  Being, by all accounts, a girl of remarkable force of character, she resolved to cut the Gordian knot by leaving London, and, fearing lest her affianced husband’s conscientiousness should induce him to sacrifice himself to her; dreading also, perhaps, her own weakness, she made the parting