a good proportion of
Trebians present, the whisperings spread rapidly.
    The court was still more crowded than on the previous day, when our poor
acquaintance Dredge and his two collier companions were sentenced to a year's
imprisonment with hard labour, and the more enlightened prisoner, who stole the
Debarrys' plate, to transportation for life. Poor Dredge had cried, had wished
he'd »never heared of a 'lection,« and in spite of sermons from the jail
chaplain, fell back on the explanation that this was a world in which Spratt and
Old Nick were sure to get the best of it; so that in Dredge's case, at least,
most observers must have had the melancholy conviction that there had been no
enhancement of public spirit and faith in progress from that wave of political
agitation which had reached the Sproxton Pits.
    But curiosity was necessarily at a higher pitch to-day, when the character
of the prisoner and the circumstances of his offence were of a highly unusual
kind. As soon as Felix appeared at the bar, a murmur rose and spread into a loud
buzz, which continued until there had been repeated authoritative calls for
silence in the court. Rather singularly, it was now for the first time that
Esther had a feeling of pride in him on the ground simply of his appearance. At
this moment, when he was the centre of a multitudinous gaze, which seemed to act
on her own vision like a broad unmitigated daylight, she felt that there was
something pre-eminent in him, notwithstanding the vicinity of numerous
gentlemen. No apple-woman would have admired him; not only to feminine minds
like Mrs Tiliot's, but to many minds in coat and waistcoat, there was something
dangerous and perhaps unprincipled in his bare throat and great Gothic head; and
his somewhat massive person would doubtless have come out very oddly from the
hands of a fashionable tailor of that time. But as Esther saw his large grey
eyes looking round calmly and undefiantly, first at the audience generally, and
then with a more observant expression at the lawyers and other persons
immediately around him, she felt that he bore the outward stamp of a
distinguished nature. Forgive her if she needed this satisfaction: all of us -
whether men or women - are liable to this weakness of liking to have our
preference justified before others as well as ourselves. Esther said inwardly,
with a certain triumph, that Felix Holt looked as worthy to be chosen in the
midst of this large assembly, as he had ever looked in their tête-à-tête under
the sombre light of the