The trial occupied three days.  After the first of the three, my respected brother-in-law preferred, as he said, not to prejudice the case against the prisoner by appearing in court again.  He did not even allude to the little matter of the ten per cent commission further than to say at dinner that evening that all men were bound to protect their own interests—­as secretaries or as principals.  This I took for forgiveness; and I continued diligently to attend the trial, and watch the case in my employer’s interest.

The defence was ingenious, even if somewhat halting.  It consisted simply of an attempt to prove throughout that Charles and I had made our prisoner the victim of a mistaken identity.  Finglemore put into the box the ingenuous original of the little curate—­the Reverend Septimus Porkington, as it turned out, a friend of his family; and he showed that it was the Reverend Septimus himself who had sat to a photographer in Baker Street for the portrait which Charles too hastily identified as that of Colonel Clay in his personification of Mr. Richard Brabazon.  He further elicited the fact that the portrait of the Count von Lebenstein was really taken from Dr. Julius Keppel, a Tyrolese music-master, residing at Balham, whom he put into the box, and who was well known, as it chanced, to the foreman of the jury.  Gradually he made it clear to us that no portraits existed of Colonel Clay at all, except Dolly Lingfield’s—­so it dawned upon me by degrees that even Dr. Beddersley could only have been misled if we had succeeded in finding for him the alleged photographs of Colonel Clay as the count and the curate, which had been shown us by Medhurst.  Altogether, the prisoner based his defence upon the fact that no more than two witnesses directly identified him; while one of those two had positively sworn that he recognised as the prisoner’s two portraits which turned out, by independent evidence, to be taken from other people!

The judge summed up in a caustic way which was pleasant to neither party.  He asked the jury to dismiss from their minds entirely the impression created by what he frankly described as “Sir Charles Vandrift’s obvious dishonesty.”  They must not allow the fact that he was a millionaire—­and a particularly shady one—­to prejudice their feelings in favour of the prisoner.  Even the richest—­and vilest—­of men must be protected.  Besides, this was a public question.  If a rogue cheated a rogue, he must still be punished.  If a murderer stabbed or shot a murderer, he must still be hung for it.  Society must see that the worst of thieves were not preyed upon by others.  Therefore, the proved facts that Sir Charles Vandrift, with all his millions, had meanly tried to cheat the prisoner, or some other poor person, out of valuable diamonds—­had basely tried to juggle Lord Craig-Ellachie’s mines into his own hands—­had vilely tried to bribe a son to betray his father—­had directly tried, by underhand means, to save his own