'You lie, traitress!' he said, in vibrating tones. 'I never saw Balooka before that evening, and you know it. Your words—like yourself—are false as hell!'

'I submit, your worship, that the witness must be protected,' Dayrell made haste to interpose. 'If she is to be intimidated, I cannot guarantee her most important evidence.'

A curious phase of human nature is it,—well worthy of the attention of physiologists, but none the less known to those in the habit of attending criminal courts,—that you may with tolerable certainty detect a man deliberately swearing falsely when giving evidence on oath. Villain as he may be,—scoundrel of the deepest dye,—even he does not altogether enjoy the sensation of, in cold blood, committing perjury before a crowd of comrades, every one of whom knows that he is forswearing himself. Thus feeling, there is generally some token of uneasiness or shamefacedness by which the experienced magistrate or judge, and most certainly his friends and fellows, can perceive his perjury.

But, strange and mysterious as it may seem, it is not so in the case of a female witness. She may be deposing to the truth of the most atrocious falsehood, to what the greater part of her hearers, as well as herself, know to be false, and not the quiver of an eyelid nor the tremor of a muscle reveals that she has called upon the Supreme Being to witness her deliberate betrayal of the truth. For all that can be discerned in the countenance—in her mien and manner she may be clinging to the truth with the constancy of a martyr.

There was a murmur in the court from more than one voice as Lance Trevanion's heart-felt exclamation burst forth. This being promptly suppressed, the magistrate, with a more sympathetic tone of voice than he had as yet used, 'requested the prisoner not to injure his case by intemperate language. Possibly the outburst of conscious innocence, the Bench admitted, but he would warn him, in his own interest, to reserve his defence till the evidence was completed.' Lance apparently saw the force of his argument, for after one withering glance at the witness-box, he bowed his head without speaking, and resigned himself apparently to listen unmoved to all further statements.

'Did you—now consider carefully and make no mistake'—here the sergeant fixed his eye sternly, even menacingly, upon the girl, who stood calm and resolved before him—'did you know of your own knowledge that the prisoner, Trevanion, met your brother Ned at the Swampy Plain tableland and assisted him to drive certain horses into the yard?'

The girl looked again across to the figures in the dock, neither of whom apparently saw her, as they, by accident or otherwise, had averted their faces. Then a mysterious darksome look of pride and revenge came over Kate Lawless's face as she coolly scrutinised them both. Slowly she answered—

'Yes; I was at home when he and Ned came in from Swampy Plains with ten horses and put them into the yard.'

'You swear that?'

'Yes,' looking her interlocutor full in the face. 'Yes, I swear that.'