If I go into prison without love, what will become of my soul ?" The letters I wrote to you at that time from Holloway were my efforts to keep love as the dominant note of my own nature.

I could, if I had chosen, have torn you to pieces with bitter reproaches.

I could have rent you with maledictions.
The sins of another were being placed to my account.

Had I so chosen, I could on either trial have saved myself at his expense, not from shame indeed, but from imprisonment.[54] Had I cared to show that the crown witnesses--the three most important--had been carefully coached by your father and his solicitors, not in reticences merely, but in assertions, in the absolute transference deliberate, plotted, and rehearsed, of the actions and doings of someone else on to me, I could have had each one of them dismissed from the box by the judge, more summarily than even wretched perjured Atkins was.

I could have walked out of court with my tongue in my cheek, and my hands in my pockets, a free man.