The room was not only filled, but crammed, with furniture.  This was the first thing they noticed; then, as their blinking eyes became accustomed to the glare and to the unexpected confusion of tables and chairs and screens and standing receptacles for books and pamphlets and boxes labelled and padlocked, they beheld something else; something, which once seen, held the eye from further wandering and made the apprehensions from which they had suffered sink into insignificance before a real and only too present terror.

The judge was there! but in what a condition.

From the end of the forty foot room, his seated figure confronted them, silent, staring and unmoving.  With clenched fingers gripping the arms of his great chair, and head held forward, he looked like one frozen at the moment of doom, such the expression of features usually so noble, and now almost unrecognisable were it not for the snow of his locks and his unmistakable brow.

Frozen!  Not an eyelash quivered, nor was there any perceptible movement in his sturdy chest.  His eyes were on their eyes, but he saw no one; and down upon his head and over his whole form the sunshine poured from a large window let into the ceiling directly above him, lighting up the strained and unnatural aspect of his remarkable countenance and bringing into sharp prominence the commonplace objects cluttering the table at his elbow; such as his hat and gloves, and the bundle of papers he had doubtless made ready for court.

Was he living?  Was he dead?—­stricken by the sight of so many faces in a doorway considered sacred from all intrusion?  No! the emotion capable of thus transforming the features of so strong a man must have a deeper source than that.  The woman was to blame for this—­the audacious, the unknown, the mysteriously clad woman.  Let her be found.  Let her be made to explain herself and the condition into which she had thrown this good man.

Indignation burst into words, and pity was beginning to voice itself in inarticulate murmurs which swelled and ebbed, now louder, now more faintly as the crowd surged forward or drew back, appalled by that moveless, breathless, awe-compelling figure.  Indignation and pity were at their height when the strain which held them all in one common leash was loosed by the movement of a little child.

Attracted possibly by what it did not understand, or simply made fearless because of its non-comprehension of the mystery before him, a curly-haired boy suddenly escaped its mother’s clutch, and, toddling up by a pathway of his own to the awesome form in the great chair, laid his little hand on the judge’s rigid arm and, looking up into his face, babbled out: 

“Why don’t you get up, man?  I like oo better up.”

A breathless moment; then the horrified murmur rose here, there and everywhere:  “He’s dead!  He’s dead!” and the mother, with a rush, caught the child back, and confusion began its reign, when quietly and convincingly a bluff and masculine voice spoke from the doorway behind them and they heard: