My mind was clouded all over, and I gave up the attempt to clear it in despair.
I was brought before Mr.Robert Nicholson that day, and the fiend of a quadroon was examined in my presence.

The first sight of her face, with its wicked self-possession, with its smooth leering triumph, so sickened me that I turned my head away and never looked at her a second time throughout the proceedings.

The answers she gave amounted to a mere repetition of the deposition to which she had already sworn.

I listened to her with the most breathless attention, and was thunderstruck at the inconceivable artfulness with which she had mixed up truth and falsehood in her charge against my mistress and me.
This was, in substance, what she now stated in my presence: After describing the manner of Mr.James Smith's arrival at the Hall, the witness, Josephine Durand, confessed that she had been led to listen at the music-room door by hearing angry voices inside, and she then described, truly enough, the latter part of the altercation between husband and wife.

Fearing, after this, that something serious might happen, she had kept watch in her room, which was on the same floor as her mistress's.