WHAT CAME OF THE TRIAL

"When this is over, Kathleen, I will come to you." So Charley Steele's
eyes had said to a lady in the court room on that last day of the great
trial. The lady had left the court-room dazed and exalted. She, with
hundreds of others, had had a revelation of Charley Steele; had had also
the great emotional experience of seeing a crowd make the 'volte face'
with their convictions; looking at a prisoner one moment with eyes of
loathing and anticipating his gruesome end, the next moment seeing him
as the possible martyr to the machinery of the law. She whose heart was
used to beat so evenly had felt it leap and swell with excitement,
awaiting the moment when the jury filed back into the court-room. Then
it stood still, as a wave might hang for an instant at its crest ere it
swept down to beat upon the shore.

With her as with most present, the deepest feeling in the agitated
suspense was not so much that the prisoner should go free, as that the
prisoner's counsel should win his case. It was as if Charley Steele were
on trial instead of the prisoner. He was the imminent figure; it was his
fate that was in the balance--such was the antic irony of suggestion.
And the truth was, that the fates of both prisoner and counsel had been
weighed in the balance that sweltering August day.

The prisoner was forgotten almost as soon as he had left the court-room
a free man, but wherever men and women met in Montreal that day, one name
was on the lips of all-Charley Steele! In his speech he had done two
things: he had thrown down every barrier of reserve--or so it seemed--
and had become human and intimate. "I could not have believed it of
him," was the remark on every lip. Of his ability there never had been