The face of the judge cleared and grew hard. The members of the
bar were attentive and alert; they were beginning to see the legal
escape open up. The audience were puzzled; they did not yet
understand. Mason turned to the counsel for the People. His ugly
face was bitter with contempt.

"For three days," he said," I have been tortured by this useless
and expensive farce. If counsel for the People had been other than
play-actors, they would have known in the beginning that Victor
Ancona could not be convicted for murder, unless he were confronted
in this court room with a living witness, who had looked into the
dead face of Nina San Croix; or, if not that, a living witness who
had seen him drive the dagger into her bosom.

"I care not if the circumstantial evidence in this case were so
strong and irresistible as to be overpowering; if the judge on the
bench, if the jury, if every man within sound of my voice, were
convinced of the guilt of the prisoner to the degree of certainty
that is absolute; if the circumstantial evidence left in the mind
no shadow of the remotest improbable doubt; yet, in the absence of
the eyewitness, this prisoner cannot be punished, and this Court
must compel the jury to acquit him."

The audience now understood, and they were dumfounded. Surely this
was not the law. They had been taught that the law was common
sense, and this,--this was anything else.

Mason saw it all, and grinned. "In its tenderness," he sneered,
"the law shields the innocent. The good law of New York reaches