t did they bring her here for? She could not know anything,
and why did they want to pester the poor thing? Didn't the poor little
thing look sorry and troubled enough without fetching her down here to
bring it all up to her? He roused himself to look reassuringly at the
girl, as though to tell her not to mind, that it did not matter
anyway, that he knew she could not help him, and that she must not let
them hurt her.

Dardis, to forestall objections and to ensure Cynthe against
interruptions from the prosecutor or the Judge, had told her to say
nothing about fire but to speak directly about the killing of Rogers
and nothing else. So when, after she had been sworn, he told her to
relate the things that led up to the killing, she began at the very
beginning:

"Four years ago," she said, "Rafe Gadbeau was in Utica. A man was
killed in a crowd. His knife had been used to kill the man. Rafe
Gadbeau did not do that. Often he has sworn to me that he did not know
who had done it. But a detective, a man named Rogers, found the knife
and traced it to Rafe Gadbeau. He did not arrest him. No, he kept the
knife, saying that some day he would call upon Rafe Gadbeau for the
price of his silence.

"Last summer this man Rogers came into the woods looking for some one
to help get the people to sell their land. He saw Rafe Gadbeau. He
showed him the knife. He told him that whatever he laid upon him to
do, that he must do. He made him lie to the people. He made him attack
the young Whiting. He made him do many things that he would not do,
for Rafe Gadbeau was not a bad man, only foolish sometimes. And Rafe
Gadbeau was sore under the yoke of fear that this man had put upon
him.

"At times he said to me, 'Cynthe, I will kill this man one day, and
that will be the end of all.' But I said, '_Non, non, mon Rafe_, we
will marry in the fall, and go away to far Beaupre where he will never
see you again, and we will not know that he ever lived.'"

Cynthe had forgotten her audience. She was telling over to herself the
tragedy of her little life and her great love. Genius could not have
told her how better to tell it for the purpose for which her story was
here needed. Dardis thanked his stars that he had taken the Bishop's
advice, to let her get through with it in her own way.

"But it was not time for us to marry yet," she went on. "Then came the
morning of the nineteenth August. I was sitting on the back steps of
my aunt's house by the Li