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I looked at the brothers as the weight of the evidence pressed more and more heavily against them. To outward view at least, Ambrose still maintained his self-possession. It was far otherwise with Silas. Abject terror showed itself in his ghastly face; in his great knotty hands, clinging convulsively to the bar at which he stood; in his staring eyes, fixed in vacant horror on each witness who appeared. Public feeling judged him on the spot. There he stood, self-betrayed already, in the popular opinion, as a guilty man!

The one point gained in cross-examination by the defense related to the charred bones.

Pressed on this point, a majority of the medical witnesses admitted that their examination had been a hurried one; and that it was just possible that the bones might yet prove to be the remains of an animal, and not of a man. The presiding magistrate decided upon this that a second examination should be made, and that the member of the medical experts should be increased.

Here the preliminary proceedings ended. The prisoners were remanded for three days.

The prostration of Silas, at the close of the inquiry, was so complete, that it was found necessary to have two men to support him on his leaving the court. Ambrose leaned over the bar to speak to Naomi before he followed the jailer out. “Wait,” he whispered, confidently, “till they hear what I have to say!” Naomi kissed her hand to him affectionately, and turned to me with the bright tears in her eyes.

“Why don’t they hear what he has to say at once?” she asked. “Anybody can see that Ambrose is innocent. It’s a crying shame, sir, to send him back to prison. Don’t you think so yourself?”

If I had confessed what I really thought, I should have said that Ambrose had proved nothing to my mind, except that he possessed rare powers of self-control. It was impossible to acknowledge this to my little friend. I diverted her mind from the question of her lover’s innocence by proposing that we should get the necessary order, and visit him in his prison on the next day. Naomi dried her tears, and gave me a little grateful squeeze of the hand.

“Oh my! what a good fellow you are!” cried the outspoken American girl. “When your time comes to be married, sir, I guess the woman won’t repent saying yes to you!”

Mr. Meadowcroft preserved unbroken silence as we walked back to the farm on either side of his invalid-chair. His last reserves of resolution seemed to have given way under the overwhelming strain laid on them by the proceedings in court. His daughter, in stern indulgence to Naomi, mercifully permitted her opinion to glimmer on us only through the medium of quotation from Scripture texts. If the texts meant anything, they meant that she had foreseen all that had happened; and that the one sad aspect of the case, to her mind, was the death of John Jago, unprepared to meet his end.

I obtained the order of admission to the prison the next morning.

We found Ambrose still confident of the favorable result, for his brother and for himself, of the inquiry before the magistrate. He seemed to be almost as eager to tell, as Naomi was to hear, the true story of what had happened at the limekiln. The authorities of the prison–present, of course, at the interview–warned him to remember that what he said might be taken down in writing, and produced against him in court.

“Take it down, gentlemen, and welcome,” Ambrose replied. “I have nothing to fear; I am only telling the truth.”

With that he turned to Naomi, and began his narrative, as nearly as I can remember, in these words:

“I may as well make a clean breast of it at starting, my girl. After Mr. Lefrank left us that morning, I asked Silas how he came by my stick. In telling me how, Silas also told me of the words that had passed between him and John Jago under Mr. Lefrank’s window. I was angry and jealous; and I own it freely, Naomi, I thought the worst that could be thought about you and John.”