To Frederick it was a moment of immeasurable grief and humiliation.  On every face, in every shrinking form, in subdued murmurs and open cries, he read instant and complete condemnation, and yet in all his life from boyhood up to this hour, never had he been so worthy of their esteem and consideration.  But though he felt the iron enter his soul, he did not lose his determined attitude.  He had observed a change in Amabel and a change in Agnes, and if only to disappoint the vile triumph of the one and raise again the drooping courage of the other, he withstood the clamour and began speaking again, before the coroner had been able to fully restore quiet.

“I know,” said he, “what this acknowledgment must convey to the minds of the jury and people here assembled.  But if anyone who listens to me thinks me guilty of the death I was so unfortunate as to have witnessed, he will be doing me a wrong which Agatha Webb would be the first to condemn.  Dr. Talbot, and you, gentlemen of the jury, in the face of God and man, I here declare that Mrs. Webb, in my presence and before my eyes, gave to herself the blow which has robbed us all of a most valuable life.  She was not murdered.”

It was a solemn assertion, but it failed to convince the crowd before him.  As by one impulse men and women broke into a tumult.  Mr. Sutherland was forgotten and cries of “Never!  She was too good!  It’s all calumny!  A wretched lie!” broke in unrestrained excitement from every part of the large room.  In vain the coroner smote with his gavel, in vain the local police endeavoured to restore order; the tide was up and over-swept everything for an instant till silence was suddenly restored by the sight of Amabel smoothing out the folds of her crisp white frock with an incredulous, almost insulting, smile that at once fixed attention again on Frederick.  He seized the occasion and spoke up in a tone of great resolve.

“I have made an assertion,” said he, “before God and before this jury.  To make it seem a credible one I shall have to tell my own story from the beginning.  Am I allowed to do so, Mr. Coroner?”

“You are,” was the firm response.

“Then, gentlemen,” continued Frederick, still without looking at Amabel, whose smile had acquired a mockery that drew the eyes of the jury toward her more than once during the following recital, “you know, and the public generally now know, that Mrs. Webb has left me the greater portion of the money of which she died possessed.  I have never before acknowledged to anyone, not even to the good man who awaits this jury’s verdict on the other side of that door yonder, that she had reasons for this, good reasons, reasons of which up to the very evening of her death I was myself ignorant, as I was ignorant of her intentions in my regard, or that I was the special object of her attention, or that we were under any mutual obligations in any way.  Why, then, I should have thought of going to her in the great