His brother alone had persisted, from first to last, in obstinately disbelieving the clock--for no better reason than that the clock was the witness which asserted the prisoner's guilt! He had worried everybody with incessant inquiries--he had discovered the absence of the housemaid, after the trial had begun--and he had started off to interrogate the girl, knowing nothing, and suspecting nothing; simply determined to persist in the one everlasting question with which he persecuted everybody belonging to the house: "The clock is going to hang my brother; can you tell me anything about the clock ?" Four months later, the mystery of the crime was cleared up.

One of the disreputable companions of the murdered man confessed on his death-bed that he had done the deed.

There was nothing interesting or remarkable in the circumstances.

Chance which had put innocence in peril, had offered impunity to guilt.

An infamous woman; a jealous quarrel; and an absence at the moment of witnesses on the spot--these were really the commonplace materials which had composed the tragedy of Pardon's Piece..