The Long Lane's Turning

issue, and through the confused mist of his mind his inner ear seemed to hear a far-distant sardonic laughter--as though the Djin of the bottle laughed in the locked wall-cabinet at his dismay.

He rose to speak for the defence with an icy clog upon his faculties, while beneath that frozen surface the something that had been shackled reared and struggled vainly. Vocabulary, cunning of phrase, and logical sequence of argument had not deserted him; he realised this with a blind rage that seemed with a singular separateness to lie outside of himself--to associate itself strangely with the prisoner. But the persuasion that had so often checkmated justice, the calculated force, the insinuating tactfulness, the living, warm appeal that had had their way in the past were absent. He had a curious feeling of duality, as though two Harry Seviers had suddenly and painfully drawn apart--the one whose measured voice was speaking, and the other which clamoured and appealed, conscious only of its own deadly smother an