Wilton, watching the scene with flaming eyes, sat motionless, his chin thrust down hard upon his collar, his face shining as if it had been polished with a cloth.
Sloane gave the dagger back to Crown before he spoke, in a wheezy, shrill key: "They're there, the marks, the grooves!"
He did not look at Wilton.
Hastings straightened to his full stature, and looked toward Wilton.
"Now, Judge Wilton," he challenged, "you said you preferred to answer the accusation here and now. Do you, still?"
Wilton, slowly raising the heavy lids of his eyes, like a man coming out of a trance, presented to him and to the others a face which, in spite of its flushed and swollen aspect, looked singularly bleak.
"It's not an accusation," he said in his roughened, grating voice. "It's a network of suppositions, of theories, of impossibilities—a crazy structure, all built on the rotten foundation of a previous misfortune."
"Arrest him, Crown!" Hastings commanded sharply.
Wilton tried to laugh, but his heavy lips merely worked in a crazy barrenness of sound. With a vague, clumsy idea of covering up his confusion, he started to light a cigar.