miserable life! And counsel drew a true and vivid picture of the last encounter and the last parting between Blaydes and Erichsen; but here assumed his most matter-of-fact tone and air, because the matter really sounded less like a fact than any with which he had to deal. The receipt? Nothing more natural; the watch was to be pawned, not kept, and the ticket returned to the owner. Its disappearance? Nothing simpler; had not everything disappeared from the dead man’s pockets? The receipt had found its way into that of the real murderer; so had the diamond pin.
That diamond pin was the one strong point of the defence, and Culliford treated it beautifully; he treated it from every possible point of view. It was of greater value than the watch; a minor witness, the dead man’s landlady, had told them what the dead man had told her, that he had accepted the pin as payment for a debt of seventy guineas; and that statement bore a double significance now. On the one hand, it showed a partiality in the deceased for such transactions as he had afterwards entered into with the prisoner; on the other hand, it proved that if the prisoner had robbed and murdered the deceased, then either he had omitted robbing him of his most valuable possession, or else he had concealed it so skilfully that it had never since been seen or heard of. Surely the one explanation was as unlikely as the other! But the pin was not only the more valuable article, it was the more negotiable; and this capital point was driven home with an irresistible force that lightened every heart in court, that of the prisoner at the bar included. Here was the best argument yet. It left its mark upon every face. Even the judge looked less despondent; but the jury glanced towards the dock as
