"'Wretch, die! You are not fit to pollute the hearth! Go to your grave with my 'ate and my cuss!'
"And then," cried Bob Dawson, trembling all over as he told it, "I see him lift that there knife, gentlemen, and stab her with all his might, and she fell back with a sort of groan, and he lifts her up and pitches of her over hinto the sea. And then he cuts, he does, and I—I was frightened most hawful, and I cut, too."
"Why did you not tell this before?" the judge asked.
"'Cos I was scared—I was," Bob replied, in tears. "I didn't know but that they might took and hang me for seeing it. I told mammy the other night, and mammy she came and told the gent there," pointing one finger at the counsel for the crown, "and he said I must come and tell it here; and that's all I've got to tell, and I'm werry sorry as hever I seed it, and it's all true, s'help me!"
Sybilla Silver's eyes fairly blazed with triumphant fire. Her master, the arch-fiend, seemed visibly coming to her aid; and the most miserable baronet pressed his hand to his throbbing head.
There was the summing up of the evidence—one damning mass against the prisoner. There was the judge's charge to the jury. Sir Everard heard no words—saw nothing. He fell into a stunned stupor that was indeed like madness.
The jury retired—vaguely he saw them go. They returned. Was it minutes or hours they had been gone? His dulled eyes looked at them expressionless.
"How say you, gentlemen of the jury—guilty or not guilty?"
"Guilty!"
Amid dead silence the word fell. Every heart thrilled with awe but one. The condemned man sat staring at them with an awful, dull, glazed stare.