The judges had no suspicion of the depravity of the accuser, whose station was respectable, and they administered the law in all its rigour; a rigour undoubtedly excessive.
Prior to March, 1879, Kate Webster, save to the very few, was utterly unknown; then suddenly the public learned that living in their midst was the grimmest of grim personalities, a character so uniquely sinister and barbaric as to be hardly human.