To outward view at least, Ambrose still maintained his self-possession.

It was far otherwise with Silas.

Abject terror showed itself in his ghastly face; in his great knotty hands, clinging convulsively to the bar at which he stood; in his staring eyes, fixed in vacant horror on each witness who appeared.

Public feeling judged him on the spot.

There he stood, self-betrayed already, in the popular opinion, as a guilty man! The one point gained in cross-examination by the defense related to the charred bones.
Pressed on this point, a majority of the medical witnesses admitted that their examination had been a hurried one; and that it was just possible that the bones might yet prove to be the remains of an animal, and not of a man.