XII

THE ROSE


On the third morning of his confinement in Norwich, Hogarth was
hurried into the hall of justice and the witness-box--in the dock
Fred Bates.

Bates had denied--with sufficient impudence, it seemed: for his wife
had been found dead, battered and burned about the face, Bates' own
hand also burned by the poker with which, _red-hot_, he was presumed
to have beaten her.

The same afternoon Bates was sentenced to death: but, having had
sunstroke in Egypt, was afterwards reprieved.

And two mornings later Hogarth heard the bar of the prisoner's dock
clang behind himself.

The speech of leading counsel for the Crown was short: a letter,
found on the prisoner, would be produced, in which some busybody had
falsely informed the prisoner that Mr. Frankl would meet his sister
under a certain elm-tree: and the prisoner, in a crisis of passion,
had hurried from the pulpit to that tree, on observing that his
sister had left the chapel (to keep a real appointment with Mr.
Frankl elsewhere). Under that tree the prisoner had encountered the
murdered man, whose Oriental dress on a dark night would give him a