proved I had not done.  Now the statement made by me before the magistrates had been put in evidence, and in it I said that the tale was an absolute invention on the part of Sir John Bell, and that when I went to see Lady Colford I had no knowledge whatsoever that my wife was suffering from an infectious ailment.  This, he submitted, was the true version of the story, and he confidently asked the jury not to blast the career of an able and rising man, but by their verdict to reinstate him in the position which he had temporarily and unjustly lost.

In reply, the leading counsel for the Crown said that it was neither his wish nor his duty to strain the law against me, or to put a worse interpretation upon the facts than they would bear under the strictest scrutiny.  He must point out, however, that if the contention of his learned friend were correct, Sir John Bell was one of the wickedest villains who ever disgraced the earth.

In summing up the judge took much the same line.  The case, that was of a character upon which it was unusual though perfectly allowable to found a criminal prosecution, he pointed out, rested solely upon the evidence of Sir John Bell, corroborated as it was by the nurse.  If that evidence was correct, then, to satisfy my own ambition or greed, I had deliberately risked and, as the issue showed, had taken the life of a lady who in all confidence was entrusted to my care.  Incredible as such wickedness might seem, the jury must remember that it was by no means unprecedented.  At the same time there was a point that had been scarcely dwelt upon by counsel to which he would call their attention.  According to Sir John Bell’s account, it was from his lips that I first learned that my wife was suffering from a peculiarly dangerous ailment.  Yet, in his report of the conversation that followed between us, which he gave practically verbatim, I had not expressed a single word of surprise and sorrow at this dreadful intelligence, which to an affectionate husband would be absolutely overwhelming.  As it had been proved by the evidence of the nurse and elsewhere that my relations with my young wife were those of deep affection, this struck him as a circumstance so peculiar that he was inclined to think that in this particular Sir John’s memory must be at fault.

There was, however, a wide difference between assuming that a portion of the conversation had escaped a witness’s memory and disbelieving all that witness’s evidence.  As the counsel for the Crown had said, if he had not, as he swore, warned me, and I had not, as he swore, refused to listen to his warning, then Sir John Bell was a moral monster.  That he, Sir John, at the beginning of my career in Dunchester had shown some prejudice and animus against me was indeed admitted.  Doubtless, being human, he was not pleased at the advent of a brilliant young rival, who very shortly proceeded to prove him in the wrong in the instance of one of his own patients, but that he had conquered this feeling, as a man of generous impulses would naturally do, appeared to be clear from the fact that he had volunteered to attend upon that rival’s wife in her illness.