Page:Romance & Reality 2.pdf/185

Rh Mr. Trevyllian.—"Does sympathy often go much further?" Mr. Morland.—"Look at the daily papers: to what eloquence do they attain when an affair of the heart becomes an affair of the police!" Mr. Trevyllian.—"My way hither lay through the county town, where I stopped to take 'mine ease at mine inn,' of which I soon grew tired enough. One does many rash things from idleness. The assizes were being held, and I demolished a fragment of our great enemy, Time, in court. The case being tried was what is called, par distinction, an interesting case. A man, in the desperation of a refusal (common people take those things strangely to heart), had stabbed the obdurate fair one with his knife. She was herself the prosecutrix. The counsel denounced the crime: he should have denounced the criminal's taste. As the evidence proceeded, one thing was in his favour—that, after stabbing the woman, he ran and fetched the doctor: 'a manifest proof,' as the judge observed, 'of his good heart.' Well, the jury could not agree, and accordingly were shut up to their dinnerless discussion—a method of proceeding, by the by, enough to produce