‘How is it then,’ said Mrs Thorne, ’that Lord Lufton, and my husband, and the other wiseacres at Silverbridge, have committed him for trial?’

‘Because we are told to do so by the lawyer,’ said Dr Thorne.

’Ladies will never understand that magistrates must act in accordance with the law,’ said Lord Lufton.

‘But you all say he’s not guilty,’ said Mrs Robarts.

‘The fact is, that the magistrate cannot try the question,’ said the archdeacon; ’they only hear primary evidence.  In this case I don’t believe Crawley would ever have been committed if he had employed an attorney, instead of speaking for himself.’

‘Why didn’t somebody make him have an attorney?’ said Lady Lufton.

’I don’t think any attorney in the world could have spoken for him better than he spoke for himself,’ said Dr Thorne.

‘And yet you committed him,’ said his wife.  ’What can we do for him?  Can’t we pay the bail and send him off to America?’

‘A jury will never find him guilty,’ said Lord Lufton.

‘And what is the truth of it?’ asked the younger Lady Lufton.

Then the whole matter was discussed again, and it was settled among them all that Mr Crawley had undoubtedly appropriated the cheque through temporary obliquity of judgment—­obliquity of judgment and forgetfulness as to the source from whence the cheque had come to him.  ’He has picked it up about the house, and then has thought that it was his own,’ said Lord Lufton.  Had they come to the conclusion that such an appropriation of money had been made by one of the clergy of the palace, by one of the Proudieian party, they would doubtless have been very loud and very bitter as to the iniquity of the offender.  They would have said as much as to the weakness of the bishop and the wickedness of the bishop’s wife, and would have declared the appropriator to have been as very a thief as ever picked a pocket or opened a bill;—­but they were unanimous in their acquittal of Mr Crawley.  It had not been his intention, they said, to be a thief, and a man should be judged only by his intention.  It must now be their object to induce a Barchester jury to look at the matter in the same light.

‘When they come to understand how the land lies,’ said the archdeacon, ’they will be all right.  There’s not a tradesman in the city who does not hate that woman as though she were—­’

‘Archdeacon,’ said his wife, cautioning him to repress his energy.

’Their bills are all paid by this new chaplain they’ve got, and he is made to claim discount on every leg of mutton,’ said the archdeacon.  Arguing from which fact—­or from which assertion, he came to the conclusion that no Barchester jury would find Mr Crawley guilty.