He was remanded for a week: a week of feverish public excitement and of great suspense for those that loved him. His name was dragged through the mire of the roadways, then held up to execration. He had feasted at an old man’s table, and, before the generous glow of the host’s wine had had time to cool, had foully murdered him for money. Imagination boggled at the conception of a meaner miscreant. Thus the man in the street, who is seldom guided by the abstract principle of British justice. The press began to spread abroad a horrible fame. A poet, a brilliant advocate, a man in the public eye; they extolled his achievements. Those to whom his name had been hitherto unknown forgot their ignorance and feigned long acquaintance. His poems were read by self-conscious hundreds. Stories of forensic triumphs recapitulated by half-penny evening newspapers, with sensational exaggeration, brought his fame as an advocate whither no poetry ever penetrated. His friends stood by sickened and helpless.

“If he gets off, there’ll be a boom in Colmans,” said a cynical clubman to a friend. “He’ll be the darling of the boudoir and the champion of the thieves’ kitchen. He always was a lucky beggar.”

“Hush, there’s Merriam at your elbow,” whispered the other.

But Gerard had overheard. He gave the speaker an inscrutable look and passed on.

Habitually taciturn, Gerard spoke very little of his feelings in the matter. His acquaintances who knew of the close friendship refrained from allusion. At home he smoked in silence. Irene, measuring his anxiety by her ideal of the love between Hugh and himself, respected his reserve. But her own pain burned within her and shone from her eyes in a strange light. She waited anxiously with him for a promised visit from Harroway, the solicitor, after his first interview with the prisoner. Harroway was shown into the smoking-room, sat on a straight-backed chair away from the fireplace, and mopped his forehead with his handkerchief. He was a short, stout, florid man, and had walked fast from the police station; trouble and perplexity had also disturbed legal coolness.

“It’s like trying to ride through a brick wall,” he said. “He won’t open his mouth. Same story to me as to the magistrate. Can’t bring a single witness to prove his whereabouts.”

“That’s absurd,” said Gerard. “A man can’t exist a whole night in London in Stygian solitude.”

“That’s what I told him. A cabman, a servant, a barman, a coffee-stall keeper—anyone would do. Somebody must have seen him. He says: ‘I left The Lindens at eleven-thirty and I got home at six-thirty. Assume that I have lost my memory completely for those seven hours and do what you can for me.’”

“But can he have lost his memory?” said Irene. “Such things have happened.”

Harroway shook his head significantly. “Not he. It’s pure suicidal obstinacy. You know the kind of man. I’m sure I don’t know what to do. There’s enough against him already—that confounded security of his was in the missing deed-box. God knows what more the police have up their sleeve. An alibi is the only thing. I told him. Replies that there is no question of proving an alibi. You know he might almost as well plead guilty at once. What is one to do, Merriam?”

“Cherchez, la femme,” replied Gerard.

“Well, can either of you give me any idea? You, Mrs. Merriam——?”

“There is someone he is fond of in a way,” said Irene. “But who can it be? It is someone I don’t know. But surely, if it is a woman, she will come forward.”

“Don’t be too sure of that,” said Gerard.

“I asked him point-blank,” continued Harroway, “Is the woman——? But before I could get any further, he turns upon me with one of his Paladin airs, and tells me he never suggested that a woman was involved.”

“That settles it,” said Gerard. “Either that or guilt.”

“Heaven knows,” sighed Harroway. “And that’s the man I had set my heart upon making the biggest criminal advocate of the day.”

“Oh, you must go and use all your influence over him, Gerard,” said Irene, anxiously.

“Do you think I have ever stopped him from doing a pig-headed action, all the years I have known him?”

“But he loves you above everybody. He must listen to you.”

“Why not yourself?” asked Gerard, in a curious tone that caused the solicitor to glance sharply at him. “We will both go, Gerard—together.”

“Not a bit of good,” said Harroway, rising to depart. “He sent many kind messages—says he’ll write at length. But won’t see you. Won’t see a soul but me. He’s as proud, in that cell, as Lucifer. But what the dickens he’s got to be proud about in getting himself into this ghastly mess is more than I can imagine.”

The solicitor gone, Irene turned to Gerard.

“Harroway thinks it will go ill with Hugh.”

“So do I—if he keeps up this attitude.”

“There is something beneath,” said Irene, moving to the stool by the fire, near his feet, and putting her hand on his knee. “We had a talk on the day before. I wrote to you at Edinburgh about it. He was on the point of committing some folly—hoped we would not think him a scoundrel. What does it mean?”

Gerard stretched out his arms and clasped his hands behind his head.

“I’m sure I don’t know. The man was always like that. One never could tell his next escapade. What’s the matter? You’re shivering.”

“Oh, I am frightened, Gerard, dear. I have a foreboding that ill will come of it—for all of us.”

“What the dickens has it got to do with you and me?” said Gerard.

She sat silent for awhile, looking into the flaming abysses and fantastic crags of the fire. Then suddenly she turned, excited, clasped his knees and looked passionately into his face.

“We must move heaven and earth, Gerard. He is your second self. If he should—if anything should happen to him—he would be with us always, reproaching us with his dead eyes for not saving him. I owe him your life, my beloved—and mine—for without you I should die—Gerard, dear.”

She was a little excited, spoke a trifle shrilly. Gerard unclasped his hands and bent forward. Interpreting the gesture according to her heart, she knelt and swiftly closed his arms around her, and nestled close to him.

“You may be sure I shall do all I can,” he said.

She closed her eyes. The man’s calm strength of voice, the hidden strength of his frame reassured her fears.

“Forgive me for doubting while you are here to save him,” she murmured, in her blind faith.

A few moments later some domestic duty summoned her away. Gerard rose, and stretched himself and yawned.

“Oh, damn!” he said, irritably.

Then, lighting his pipe, he strode out the house, and tramped along the Heath Road, with the air of a man who is justifying to himself a series of expletives.

The week expired. Hugh was again brought before the magistrates and committed for trial.

The key turned in the cell-door in Holloway Gaol, and he was left alone for the night. In a state of semi-sanity he abandoned himself to the ghastly panorama of the day, as it passed and repassed in incoherent fragments before his eyes. He was prostrate with fatigue and strain, utterly brain-weary, incapable of lucid arrangement of ideas, almost of calculating the weight of the evidence against him.

Fresh facts had been brought to light. The butler had heard him speak in angry tones when he had entered the room with the spirit-tray. The entry in Israel’s private ledger assigning the stolen deed-box as the depository of the £5,000 security had been confirmed by the confidential clerk. Moreover, the empty box had been discovered, broken open, in the trunk of a hollow tree in the wood behind The Lindens. The prisoner had returned with a mysterious parcel of which he could give no account. On searching his rooms after arrest, the police had found the grate full of scrupulously reduced paper-ash. The inference was that this ash represented the stolen bond. It was another instance of the irony that marked this extraordinary freak of circumstances. Even his careful destruction of Minna’s letters and all memorials of her was turned into evidence against him. Medical testimony placed one o’clock and five as the extreme limits between which the murder could possibly have been committed. Probabilities pointed to three o’clock.

In his sleepless and disordered, fancy, the witnesses jostled each other in the box, giving inconsequent scraps of evidence. But clearest before his mind rose the picture of Minna, his wife, the sole person in the universe that could be absolutely certain of his innocence. There she stood, appalling in the wreckage of her beauty, a thin, black, pinched figure, hollow-eyed, drawn-lipped, telling the half truth that was more damnable than a lie. She had parted from Mr. Colman at eleven, had gone up to her room. Had heard no sound in the house till she was awakened in the morning to learn the horrible news. The relations between Mr. Colman and her father had always been most cordial. He had dined with them that evening, her father in the best of spirits. Mr. Hart had never mentioned that Mr. Colman was a client. Clients were not visiting acquaintances. That was all. She had not met his eyes, scarcely those of the Crown prosecutor or the magistrate when they questioned her. Had replied doggedly, in the deep, hard voice he had grown so familiar with of late. But one year ago it had stirred all the fibres in his body. To-day not a vestige of its richness remained.

She floated fantastic in his memories. Once during the night he fell into a brief half-sleep. She gave him again the brown-paper parcel—but loose this time, so that the paper slipped away, and revealed a halter. He woke sweating with the nightmare. Anything approaching sleep was thenceforth impossible. The dim, perpetual, inextinguishable light in his cell grew to a maddening irritation. He yearned for the soothing comfort of darkness. He wrapped his head in his bedclothes to shut out the light—but with the ill success familiar to all who have tried it. So, until the dawn, he remained staringly awake, and the phantasmagoria of his trial swept endlessly on.

Faces of friends, anxious, incredulous, seen in the crowded little court, rose up before him. Gerard’s and Irene’s most continuously. She wore a tight-fitting dark-blue jacket and a little toque to match, set amid the fair waves of her hair. He remembered vividly every detail—the white stitching of her black gloves. He strove to keep her image before him—the sweetness of her smile, the trust in her grey eyes. But Minna, hard and sullen, came and blotted out the more gracious fantasy. Again he recalled Irene—the last scene, before he was led away to the prison van, when friends crowded round the dock; Gerard among the first.

“It’s bound to come right, Hugh. We’ll do our best.”

Irene had struggled forward and the others had fallen back. And she had put up both hands, which he, leaning over, had taken in his; and he had seen the great pain burning beneath her eyes.

“Oh, Hugh, if our love for you can do anything—use it—God bless you!”

A hurried speech, uttered in the swiftness of the hand-clasp. He tried to keep it with him as a charm against the bugbears of the night. But until the warder came at half-past six to wake him, they swam before him in a whirling, reiterative circle, recurring almost rhythmically like the separate monstrosities of horses in an infernal merry-go-round.

Day came, and with it clearness of mind and logical sense of proportion. When Harroway, the solicitor, arrived, he discussed the situation with practised acuteness. His defence was clear. The stealing of the security was too ludicrous an expedient for a man of his intelligence. Besides, its legal value was that of a blank sheet of foolscap. Of this Hart’s confidential clerk had full knowledge. Would a jury believe a man to be so idiotic as to commit a murder in order to steal that which he knew to be worthless? Was it likely that a man who had committed a murder at three o’clock would deliberately postpone his return home—a quarter of an hour’s walk—until an hour when his arrival would be certain to attract attention? But Harroway shook his head dolefully.

“Of course we’ll put all that forward. But the self-incriminating stupidity of criminals is a by-word. If the attorney or solicitor-general is prosecuting and takes his privilege of answering Gardiner, he will convince the jury of this little fact. It would be much more to the point if you would tell us how to prove an alibi. That’s the infernal part of it. No one is such a damned fool as to believe that you were lying drunk and invisible in a gutter all night. You can prove an alibi if you like, can’t you?”

“Certainly,” replied Hugh, with a baffling twirl of his moustache. “But I am going to do no such thing. Please consider that final. If you and Gardiner can’t get me off without it—well, I’ll hang. Jouir, mourir et ne rien dire! And that’s the end of it.”

He put his hands in his pockets and shrugged his shoulders magnificently. The stout solicitor rose with irritation.

“You are a confounded anachronism. You were meant for the Marquis de—de—God-knows-what in the French Revolution. You would think it a fine thing to stay the hangman until you had used your toothpick. You don’t understand that a life like yours is of value nowadays. You are risking it—braving the gallows for some infernal woman. It stands to reason. I am sick of women!”

“So am I, Harroway,” replied Hugh, coolly. “You seem to have got them on the brain. Let us change the conversation.”

Soon afterwards Harroway departed, and the day wore on. The next passed and the next, and other days followed in dreary succession. They added ten years to his life. In spite of defiant resolve to consider no phase of the prison discipline and degradation, the taint of the cell ate into his flesh and weakened his soul with strange cowardices. Sometimes the weight of evidence crushed him overwhelmingly and he shook in an agony of terror at the consequences. The strain of silence and secrecy suffocated him. Like a diver who has just exceeded his habitual period of immersion, he felt that in another moment his temples would burst and his heart fail. Then he would ask himself passionately the reason of his silence, rebel against the self-imposed imprisonment of speech. Was she worth the folly of this sacrifice—she whose inconceivable avarice seemed to have annihilated elementary human emotion? If the loss of her money should kill her—were it not better that she should die? To brave the trial, secure acquittal, live through the eternal after-stain of suspicion—for that he was prepared. But to face the gallows—accept her gift of the halter—his courage failed him. The cold sweat of the nightmare broke out from head to foot. He clung desperately to life.

Once a shaft of sunlight streamed into his cell and abutted on the opposite whitewashed wall. He sat on his wooden chair and leaned against the bed and watched the dust dancing in the gold. Touching some hidden chord of forgotten association—a child’s poetic fancy long ago, perhaps, translating the glory of glistening motes in the quivering mystery of the beam—it awakened an unutterable torture of yearning for the free air of the world. He threw himself on the bed and buried his face in the pillow to prevent a cry from passing his lips.

But such crises of weakness were rare, and they were always followed by long intervals of dogged and half-cynical calm. He had sunk far beneath his ideals of honour in his marriage with Minna Hart. Her taunts had been just. He, Hugh Colman, who had ever before sinned en prince, and had never shrunk from the eyes of man or woman, had played the part of a skulking villain. He had married her for her flesh, for her money, thereby wronging her. He had made her the toy of a week’s passion, and then neglected and wounded her. Now was the hour, if any there could be in the world, when he might make expiation both to her and to himself. He would take his chance, meet his destiny, this time at any rate, like a man. He would not redeem twenty lives at the price of her money. In his contradictory way the man was as proud as Lucifer.

The knowledge of the anxiety of his sisters, the dear peaceful women who worshipped him as the paragon of all the excellencies, was a perpetual pain. He wrote to them reassuringly, minimised the danger, expatiated upon the point of honour, and, knowing their sensitive spot, brought forward, with some twinges of self-contempt, the family pride. Death before dishonour—but death a remote contingency; thus could his message be summarised. Old Geoffrey Colman, who had been illustrating the proverb that threatened men live long, also wrote on the subject of the family honour. To save it, he was willing to buy up the security—the history of the reversion was the property of a million wagging tongues. But this Hugh peremptorily declined. The debt now lay between himself and Minna. There was the pound of flesh, but not a drop of blood. Sacred should be the letter of the law.

The days passed, he scarce knew how, eventless, dull, yet filled with cravings for the vivid life of action that had been first his inheritance and then his prize. Their inactivity weighed upon him. He envied his fellow-prisoners, upon whom sentence had been passed and who had their daily tasks to execute. Chapel, exercise, meals, reading, sleep—his sole avocations. Now and then came Harroway and with him Charles Gardiner, Q.C., his friend and counsel.

Other visitors he refused to receive. Sensitive and pliant as was his nature, yet it was traversed by a seam of flint that rendered it self-sufficing. He was one of those men, capable of chivalrous impulse and lasting loyalty, who nevertheless are unable to reveal themselves entirely to dearest friend or belovedest woman; who reserve, as a jealous right, a portion of themselves for their own exclusive possession. Not only were his lips of necessity closed on this matter, but also, in the battle against circumstances which he had undertaken to fight single-handed, too vivid expression of sympathy was distasteful. His sisters would have clung about his neck and unmanned him. Irene, who would have understood his reticence, he could not receive without Gerard. And his pride shrank from the idea of meeting even Irene. The moment’s speech and hand-clasp after the trial had been sufficient to convince him of her trust in his innocence. But the thrilling pity and admiration in her eyes, he could not bear. Already she had written: “You are shielding a woman’s honour at the risk of your life; but what woman’s trumpery honour is worth such chivalry?” And he had written back in grim truthfulness: “It is no woman’s honour that I am protecting, and my attitude is far from heroic.” But he knew her well enough to realise that she would not believe his disclaimer. To destroy her feminine conception of his character was impossible; but he could not bear to masquerade in her presence in the guise of a hero.

And Gerard? During the hours of solitude, when the confused impressions of past years had bitter opportunities of crystallisation, he had suffered the shock of the discovery that their present friendship was but the simulacrum of the old. A quaint fancy figured it forth in his mind. Once clad in shells of armour, as most men are clad, they had stood together, gauntleted hand in hand, for mutual defence and common purpose. Long since they had crept out, donned other mail, but still stood the hollow figures in futile clasp, somewhat of a mockery. And a woman came and led them, now and then, each into their old habitations, whereupon they moved the hands up and down, in spasmodic greeting.

Conceits aside, something had come between them. It was not Irene, he thought, for she had kept them together, making her boast of their perfect friendship. Was the phenomenon negative, merely the cessation of mutual attraction? He could not tell. It was sufficient dismay to find that, at this time of peril, there were many other men with whose companionship he could have borne sooner than with Gerard’s. But rather than allow Irene to suspect this, he would have undergone any tortures of isolation. So he awaited his trial in proud loneliness.

And from Minna, not a sign of solicitude.