The crown attorney was a man of the serenest method and of cold, unforensic logic. He had a deadly precision of speech, a very remarkable memory, and a great power of organising and assembling his facts. There was little left of Burlingame’s appeal when he sat down. He declared that to discredit Crozier’s evidence because he chose to use another name than his own, because he was parted from his wife, because he left England practically penniless to earn an honest living--no one had shown it was not--was the last resort of legal desperation. It was an indefensible thing to endeavour to create prejudice against a man because of his own evidence given with great frankness. Not one single word of evidence had the defence brought to discredit Crozier, save by Crozier’s own word of mouth; and if Crozier had cared to commit perjury, the defence could not have proved him guilty of it. Even if Crozier had not told the truth as it was, counsel for the defence would have found it impossible to convict him of falsehood. But even if Crozier was a perjurer, justice demanded that his evidence should be weighed as truth from its own inherent probability and supported by surrounding facts. In a long experience he had never seen animus against a witness so recklessly exhibited as by counsel in this case.
The judge was not quite so severe in his summing up, but he did say of Crozier that his direct replies to Burlingame’s questions, intended to prejudice him in the eyes of the community into which he had come a stranger, bore undoubted evidence of truth; for if he had chosen to say what might have saved him from the suspicions, ill or well founded, of his present fellow-citizens, he might have done so with impunity, save for the reproach of his own conscience. On the whole, the judge summed up powerfully against the prisoner Logan, with the result that the jury were not out for more than a half-hour. Their verdict was, guilty of murder.
In the scene which followed, Crozier dropped his head into his hand and sat immovable as the judge put on the black cap and delivered sentence. When the prisoner left the dock, and the crowd began to disperse, satisfied that justice had been done--save in that small circle where the M’Mahons were supreme--Crozier rose with other witnesses to leave. As he looked ahead of him the first face he saw was that of Kitty Tynan, and something in it startled him. Where had he seen that look before? Yes, he remembered. It was when he was twenty-one and had been sent away to Algiers because he was falling in love with a farmer’s daughter. As he drove down a lane with his father towards the railway station, those long years ago, he had seen the girl’s face looking at him from the window of a labourer’s cottage at the crossroads; and its stupefied desolation haunted him for many years, even after the girl had married and gone to live in Scotland--that place of torment for an Irish soul.