You have heard the letter and listened to its answer; but he knew nothing beyond the fact--a fact which soon received a terrible significance from the events which so speedily followed." Here Mr.Moffat recapitulated those events, but always from the standpoint of the defendant--a standpoint which necessarily brought before the jury the many excellent reasons which his client had for supposing this crime to have resulted solely from the conflicting interests represented by that furtively passed note, and the visit of two girls instead of one to The Whispering Pines.

It was very convincing, especially his picture of Arthur's impulsive flight from the club-house at the first sound of his sisters' voices.
"The learned counsel for the people may call this unnatural," he cried.
"He may say that no brother would leave the place under such circumstances, whether sober or not sober, alive to duty or dead to it--that curiosity would hold him there, if nothing else.

But he forgets, if thus he thinks and thus would have you think, that the man who now confronts you from the bar is separated by an immense experience from the boy he was at that hour of surprise and selfish preoccupation.
"You who have heard the defendant tell how he could not remember if he carried up one or two bottles from the kitchen, can imagine the blank condition of this untutored mind at the moment when those voices fell upon his ear, calling him to responsibilities he had never before shouldered, and which he saw no way of shouldering now.

In that first instant of inconsiderate escape, he was alarmed for himself,--afraid of the discovery of the sneaking act of which he had just been guilty--not fearful for his sisters.

_You_ would have done differently; but you are all men disciplined to forget yourselves and think first of others, taught, in the school of life to face responsibility rather than shirk it.