“Oh! Fainted, did I!” he said musingly. “I have felt a little faint once or twice lately. What day is it? What time is it?” Tom mentioned the meeting of the previous evening, and Raeburn seemed to recollect himself. He looked at his watch, then at the letter on his desk. “Well, it's my way to do things thoroughly,” he said with a smile; “I must have been off for a couple of hours. I am very sorry to have disturbed your slumbers in this way.”
As he spoke, he sat down composedly at his desk, picked up the pen and signed his name to the letter. They stood and watched him while he folded the sheet and directed the envelope; his writing bore a little more markedly than usual the tokens of strong self-restraint.
“Perhaps you'll just drop that in the pillar on your way home,” he said to Brian. “I want Jackson to get it by the first post. If you will look in later on, I should be glad to have a talk with you. At present I'm too tired to be overhauled.”
Then, as Brian left the room, he turned to Erica.
“I am sorry to have given you a fright, my child; but don't worry about me, I am only a little overdone.”
Again that fatal admission, which from Raeburn's lips was more alarming than a long catalogue of dangerous symptoms from other men!
There followed a disturbed night and a long day in a crowded law court, then one of the most terrible hours they had ever had to endure while waiting for the verdict which would either consign Raeburn to prison or leave him to peace and freedom. So horrible was the suspense that to draw each breath was to Erica a painful effort. Even Raeburn's composure was a little shaken as those eternal minutes dragged on.
The foreman returned. The court seemed to throb with excitement. Raeburn lifted a calm, stern face to hear his fate. He knew what no one else in the court knew, that this was to him a matter of life and death.
“Are you agreed, gentlemen?”
“Yes.”