When the jury went in he had some soup upon the bench, and sipped it with great noise.  Mr. Dangerfield shook hands with his counsel, and smirked and whispered.  Many people there felt queer, and grew pale in the suspense, and the general gaze was fixed upon the prisoner with a coarse curiosity, of which he seemed resolutely unconscious; and five minutes passed by and a minute or two more—­it seemed a very long time—­the minute-hands of the watches hardly got on at all—­and then the door of the jury-room opened, and the gentlemen came stumbling in, taking off their hats, and silence was called.  There was no need; and the foreman, with a very pale and frightened face, handed down the paper.

And the simple message sounded through the court—­

‘Guilty!’

And Mr. Dangerfield bowed, and lifted up a white, smiling countenance, all over shining now with a slight moisture.

Then there was some whispering among the conductors of the prosecution; and the leader stood up to say, that, in consequence of a communication from the law officers in England, where the prisoner was to be arraigned on a capital indictment, involving serious consequences to others—­for the murder, he meant, of Mr. Beauclerc—­the crown wished that he should stand over for judgment until certain steps in that case had been taken at the other side.  Then the court enquired whether they had considered so and so; and the leader explained and satisfied his lordship, who made an order accordingly.  And Mr. Dangerfield made a low bow, with a smirk, to his lordship, and a nod, with the same, to his counsel; and he turned, and the turnkey and darkness received him.

Mr. Dangerfield, or shall we say the villain, Charles Archer, with characteristic promptitude and coolness, availed himself of the interval to try every influence he could once have set in motion, and as it were to gather his strength for a mighty tussle with the king of terrors, when his pale fingers should tap at his cell door.  I have seen two of his letters, written with consummate plausibility and adroitness, and which have given me altogether a very high idea of his powers.  But they were all received with a terrifying coldness or with absolute silence.  There was no reasoning against an intuition.  Every human being felt that the verdict was true, and that the judgment, when it came would be right:  and recoiled from the smiling gentleman, over whose white head the hempen circle hung like a diabolical glory Dangerfield, who had something of the Napoleonic faculty of never ‘making pictures’ to himself, saw this fact in its literality, and acquiesced in it.

He was a great favourite with the gaoler, whom, so long as he had the command of his money, he had treated with a frank and convivial magnificence, and who often sat up to one o’clock with him, and enjoyed his stories prodigiously, for the sarcastic man of the world lost none of his amusing qualities:  and—­the fatigues of his barren correspondence ended—­slept, and eat, and drank, pretty much as usual.