But the days went by and the inexorable hour drew nigh for the accused man’s release or condemnation.  Circumstances were against him—­so was his bearing which I alone understood.  If, as all felt, it was that of a guilty man, it was so because he had been guilty in intent if not in fact.  He had meant to attack Etheridge.  He had run down the ravine for that purpose, knowing my old friend’s whistle and envying him his watch.  Or why his foolish story of having left his stick behind him at the chestnut?  But the sound of my approaching steps higher up on the path had stopped him in mid-career and sent him rushing up the slope ahead of me.  When he came back after a short circuit of the fields beyond, it was to find his crime forestalled and by the very weapon he had thrown into the Hollow as he went skurrying by.  It was the shock of this discovery, heightened by the use he made of it to secure the booty thus thrown in his way without crime, which gave him the hang-dog look we all noted.  That there were other reasons—­that the place recalled another scene of brutality in which intention had been followed by act, I did not then know.  It was sufficient to me then that my safety was secured by his own guilty consciousness and the prevarications into which it led him.  Instead of owning up to the encounter he had so barely escaped, he confined himself to the simple declaration of having heard voices somewhere near the bridge, which to all who know the ravine appeared impossible under the conditions named.

Yet, for all these incongruities and the failure of his counsel to produce any definite impression by the prisoner’s persistent denial of having whittled the stick or even of having carried it into Dark Hollow, I expected a verdict in his favour.  Indeed, I was so confident of it that I suffered less during the absence of the jury than at any other time, and when they returned, with that air of solemn decision which proclaims unanimity of mind and a ready verdict, I was so prepared for his acquittal that for the first time since the opening of the trial, I felt myself a being of flesh and blood, with human sentiments and hopes.  And it was: 

“Guilty!”

When I woke to a full realisation of what this entailed (for I must have lost consciousness for a minute, though no one seemed to notice), the one fact staring me in the face—­staring as a live thing stares—­was that it would devolve upon me to pronounce his sentence; upon me, Archibald Ostrander, an automaton no longer, but a man realising to the full his part in this miscarriage of justice.

Somehow, strange as it may appear, I had thought little of this possibility previous to this moment.  I found myself upon the brink of this new gulf before the dizziness of my escape from the other had fully passed.  Do you wonder that I recoiled, sought to gain time, put off delivering the sentence from day to day?  I had sinned,—­sinned irredeemably—­but there are depths of infamy beyond which a man cannot go.  I had reached that point.  Chaos confronted me, and in contemplation of it, I fell ill.