Perhaps she had detected his purpose from the first, and had deliberately checkmated him.

The courtroom where justice is administered was large, clean, airythe bench carpeted and adorned with a large, green, stuffed chair, in which I sat down, and, in imagination, summoned up advocates, jurors, prisoners, and people, and wondered how I should feel pronouncing sentence of death on a fellow-being, or, like Portia, wisely checkmating the Shylocks of our times.