t. A hush fell over the room.
Here was the motive at the prosecutor's hand.

"That's what he said," Ollie affirmed, her gaze bent downward.

She told how Isom had come down after that, followed by Joe. And the
prosecutor asked her to repeat what she had heard Joe say once more for
the benefit of the jury. He spoke with the air of a man who already has
the game in the bag.

When the prosecutor was through with his profitable cross-examination,
Hammer tried to lessen the effect of Ollie's damaging disclosure, but
failed. He was a depressed and crestfallen man when he gave it up.

Ollie stepped down from the place of inquisition with the color of life
coming again into her drained lips and cheeks, the breath freer in her
throat. Her secret had not been torn from her fearful heart; she had
deepened the cloud that hung over Joe Newbolt's head. "Let him blab
now," said she in her inner satisfaction. A man might say anything
against a woman to save his neck; she was wise enough and deep enough,
for all her shallowness, to know that people were quick to understand a
thing like that.

In passing back to her place beside her mother she had not looked at
Joe. So she did not see the perplexity, anxiety, even reproach, which
had grown in Joe's eyes when she testified against him.

"She had no need to do that," thought Joe, sitting there in the glow of
the prosecutor's triumphant face. He had trusted Ollie to remain his
friend, and, although she had told nothing but the truth concerning his
rash threat against Isom, it seemed to him that she had done so with a
studied intent of working him harm.

His resentment rose against Ollie, urging him to betray her guilty
relations with Morgan and strip her of the protecting mantle which he
had wrapped about her at the first. He wondered whether Morgan had not
come and entered into a conspiracy with her to shield themselves. In
such case what would his unfolding of the whole truth amount to,
discredited as he already was in the minds of the jurors by that foolish
threat which he had uttered against Isom in the thin dawn of that
distant day?

Perhaps Alice had gone away, also, after hearing Ollie's testimony, in
the belief that he was altogether unworthy, and already branded with the
responsibility for that old man's death. He longed to look behind him
and search the throng for her, but he dared not.

Joe bowed his head, as one overwhelmed by a sense of guilt and shame,
yet never dou