“Ledsam's had a touch of nerves,” he confided. “There's been nothing else the matter with him. We've been down at the Dormy House at Brancaster and he's as right as a trivet now. That Hilditch affair did him in completely.”
“I don't see why,” one of the bystanders observed. “He got Hilditch off all right. One of the finest addresses to a jury I ever heard.”
“That's just the point,” Wilmore explained “You see, Ledsam had no idea that Hilditch was really guilty, and for two hours that afternoon he literally fought for his life, and in the end wrested a verdict from the jury, against the judge's summing up, by sheer magnetism or eloquence or whatever you fellows like to call it. The very night after, Hilditch confesses his guilt and commits suicide.”
“I still don't see where Ledsam's worry comes in,” the legal luminary remarked. “The fact that the man was guilty is rather a feather in the cap of his counsel. Shows how jolly good his pleading must have been.”
“Just so,” Wilmore agreed, “but Ledsam, as you know, is a very conscientious sort of fellow, and very sensitive, too. The whole thing was a shock to him.”
“It must have been a queer experience,” a novelist remarked from the outskirts of the group, “to dine with a man whose life you have juggled away from the law, and then have him explain his crime to you, and the exact manner of its accomplishment. Seems to bring one amongst the goats, somehow.”
“Bit of a shock, no doubt,” the lawyer assented, “but I still don't understand Ledsam's sending back all his briefs. He's not going to chuck the profession, is he?”
“Not by any means,” Wilmore declared. “I think he has an idea, though, that he doesn't want to accept any briefs unless he is convinced that the person whom he has to represent is innocent, and lawyers don't like that sort of thing, you know. You can't pick and choose, even when you have Leadsam's gifts.”
“The fact of it is,” the novelist commented, “Francis Ledsam isn't callous enough to be associated with you money-grubbing dispensers of the law. He'd be all right as Public Prosecutor, a sort of Sir Galahad waving the banner of virtue, but he hates to stuff his pockets at the expense of the criminal classes.”
“Who the mischief are the criminal classes?” a police court magistrate demanded. “Personally, I call war profiteering criminal, I call a good many Stock Exchange deals criminal, and,” he added, turning to a member of the committee who was hovering in the background, “I call it criminal to expect us to drink French vermouth like this.”