A stout and motherly-looking woman bobbed up in the witness-box and began her testimony.

Wife of the Britannia lock-keeper, I learned she was.

Time, night; a splash; she ran to the lock and found the prisoner in the water.
I flashed my gaze from her to him.

So that was the charge, self-murder.
He stood there dazed and unheeding, his bonny brown hair rumpled down his forehead, his face haggard and careworn and boyish still.
"Yes, sir," the lock-keeper's wife was saying.

"As fast as I pulled to get 'im out, 'e crawled back.