You saw the
plot at once as he constructed it; the pipe ash became
explicable in the seduction of Miss Belton's charms. The
cunning net unwove itself, delicately and deliberately,
to tangle round the lady. There was in it that superiority
in the art of legerdemain, of mere calm, astonishing
manipulation, so applauded in regions where romance has
not yet been quite trampled down by reason. Lorne scored;
he scored in face of probability, expectation, fact; it
was the very climax and coruscation of score. He scored
not only by the cards he held but by the beautiful way
he played them, if one may say so. His nature came into
this, his gravity and gentleness, his sympathy, his young
angry irony. To mention just one thing, there was the
way he held Miss Belton up, after the exposure of her
arts, as the lady for whom his client had so chivalric
a regard that he had for some time refused to state his
whereabouts at the hour the bank was entered in the fear
of compromising her. For this, no doubt, his client could
have strangled him, but it operated, of course, to raise
the poor fellow in the estimation of every body, with
the possible exception of his employers. When, after the
unmistakable summing-up, the foreman returned in a quarter
of an hour with the verdict of "Not guilty," people
noticed that the young man walked out of court behind
his father with as drooping a head as if he had gone
under sentence; so much so that by common consent he was
allowed to slip quietly away.
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