he struggled to
lift a heavy weight.

"Do you mean to sit there and tell this jury that Isom Chase stepped
right into that room and threatened to kill you without any reason,
without any previous quarrel, without seeing you doing something that
gave him ground for his threat?"

Joe moved his feet uneasily, clasped and unclasped his long fingers
where they rested on the arm of his chair, and moistened his lips with
his tongue. The struggle was coming now. They would rack him, and tear
him, and break his heart.

"I don't know whether they'll believe it or not," said he at last.

"Where was Ollie Chase when Isom came into that room?" asked the
prosecutor, lowering his voice as the men who tiptoed around old Isom
when he lay dead on the kitchen floor had lowered theirs.

"You have heard her say that she was in her room upstairs," said Joe.

"But I am asking you this question," the prosecutor reminded him
sharply. "Where was Ollie Chase?"

Joe did not meet his questioner's eyes when he answered. His head was
bowed slightly, as if in thought.

"She was in her room, I suppose. She'd been in bed a long time, for it
was nearly midnight then."

The prosecuting attorney pursued this line of questioning to a
persistent and trying length. He wanted to know all about the relations
of Joe and Ollie; where their respective rooms were, how they passed to
and from them, and the entire scheme of the household economy.

He asked Joe pointedly, and swung back to that question abruptly and
with sharp challenge many times, whether he ever made love to Ollie;
whether he ever held her hands, kissed her, talked with her when Isom
was not by to hear what was said.

The people snuggled down and forgot the oncoming darkness, the gray
forerunner of which already had invaded the room as they listened. This
was what they wanted to hear; this was, in their opinion, getting down
to the thing that the prosecutor should have taken up at the beginning
and pushed to the guilty end. They had come there, day after day, and
sat patiently waiting for that very thing. But the great sensation which
they expected seemed a tedious thing in its development.

Joe calmly denied the prosecutor's imputations, and put them aside with
an evenness of temper and dignity which lifted him to a place of high
regard in the heart of every woman present, from grandmother to
high-school miss. For even though a woman believes her sister guilty,
she admires the man w