With something like terror, I awaited the calling of my name; and, when it was delayed, it was with emotions inexplicable to myself that I looked up and saw Mr.
Moffat holding open a door at the left of the judge, with that attitude of respect, which a man only assumes in the presence and under the dominating influence of woman.
"Ella!" thought I."Instead of saving her by my contemplated sacrifice of Carmel, I have only added one sacrifice to another." But when the timid faltering step we could faintly hear crossing the room beyond, had brought its possessor within sight, and I perceived the tall, black-robed, heavily veiled woman who reached for Mr.Moffat's sustaining arm, I did not need the startling picture of the prisoner, standing upright, with outheld and repellant hands, to realise that the impossible had happened, and that all which he, as well as I, had done and left undone, suffered and suppressed, had been in vain.
Mr.Moffat, with no eye for him or for me, conducted his witness to a chair; then, as she loosened her veil and let it drop in her lap, he cried in tones which rang from end to end of the court-room: "I summon Carmel Cumberland to the stand, to witness in her brother's defence." The surprise was complete.

It was a great moment for Mr.Moffat; but for me all was confusion, dread, a veil of misty darkness, through which shone her face, marred by its ineffaceable scar, but calm as I had never expected to see it again in this life, and beautiful with a smile under which her deeply shaken and hardly conscious brother sank slowly back into his seat, amid a silence as profound as the hold she had immediately taken upon all hearts.
XXVIII "WHERE IS MY BROTHER ?" Let me see the writing.
My lord, 't is nothing.
No matter, then, who sees it; I will be satisfied, let me see the writing.
_Richard II_.
What is the explanation of Carmel's reappearance in town and of this sensational introduction of her into the court-room, in a restored state of health of which no one, so far as known, had had any intimation save the man who was responsible for her appearance?
The particulars are due you.
She had passed some weeks at Lakewood, under the eye of the nurse who was detailed to watch, as well as tend her.

During these weeks she gave no sign of improvement mentally, though she constantly gained strength otherwise, and impressed everybody with the clear light in her eye and the absence of everything suggestive of gloom in her expression and language.

There was the same complete loss of memory up to the time of the tragic occurrence which had desolated her home; the same harping at odd moments on Adelaide's happiness and her own prospect of seeing this dear sister very soon which had marked the opening days of her convalescence.

But beyond and back of all this was some secret joy, unintelligible to the nurse, which helped rather than retarded the sick girl's recovery, and made Carmel appear at times as if she walked on air and breathed the very breath of Paradise--an anomaly which not only roused Miss Unwin's curiosity, but led her to regard with something like apprehension, any change in her patient's state of mind which would rob her of the strange and unseen delights which fed her secret soul and made her oblivious of the awful facts awaiting a restored memory.
Meanwhile Carmel was allowed such liberty as her condition required; but was never left alone for a moment after a certain day when her eye suddenly took on a strange look of confused inquiry, totally dissociated with anything she saw or heard.