After a short pause, he asked her, in the same forcible but benevolent tone—
“Have you no one to speak to your character?” The prisoner answered—
A second gush of tears followed this reply, for she called to mind by whom her character had first been blasted.
He summed up the evidence; and every time he was compelled to press hard upon the proofs against her she shrunk, and seemed to stagger with the deadly blow; writhed under the weight of his minute justice, more than from the prospect of a shameful death.
The jury consulted but a few minutes. The verdict was—
“Guilty.”
She heard it with composure.
But when William placed the fatal velvet on his head, and rose to pronounce her sentence, she started with a kind of convulsive motion; retreated a step or two back, and, lifting up her hands, with a scream exclaimed—
“Oh! not from you!”
The piercing shriek which accompanied these words prevented their being heard by part of the audience; and those who heard them thought little of their meaning, more than that they expressed her fear of dying.