The Hero of the Trial "You have forced it out of me.

Now you have had your way, never mind my feelings--Go!" Those were the first words the Hero of the Trial said to me, when he was able to speak again! He withdrew with a curious sullen resignation to the farther end of the room.

There he stood looking at me, as a man might have looked who carried some contagion about him, and who wished to preserve a healthy fellow-creature from the peril of touching him.
"Why should I go ?" I asked.
"You are a bold woman," he said, "to remain in the same room with a man who has been pointed at as a murderer, and who has been tried for his life." The same unhealthy state of mind which had brought him to Dimchurch, and which had led him to speak to me as he had spoken on the previous evening, was, as I understood it, now irritating him against me as a person who had made his own quick temper the means of entrapping him into letting out the truth.

How was I to deal with a man in this condition?
I decided to perform the feat which you call in England, "taking the bull by the horns." "I see but one man here," I said.

"A man honorably acquitted of a crime which he was incapable of committing.