troubled them because they could not
make it out at all.

Colonel Price made his way forward against the outpouring stream to
Alice. He adjusted her cloak around her shoulders, and whispered to her.
She was very pale still, but her eyes were fearless and bright, and they
followed Joe Newbolt with a tender caress as the sheriff led him out,
his handcuffs in his pocket, the prisoner's long arms swinging free.

Ollie and her mother were standing near Colonel Price and Alice, waiting
for them to move along and open the passage to the aisle. As Alice
turned from looking after Joe, the eyes of the young women met, and
again Ollie felt the cold stern question which Alice seemed to ask her,
and to insist with unsparing hardness that she answer.

A little way along Alice turned her head and held Ollie's eyes with her
own again. As plain as words they said to the young widow who cringed at
her florid mother's side:

"You slinking, miserable, trembling coward, I can see right down to the
bottom of your heart!"

Joe returned to his cell with new vigor in his step, new warmth in his
breast, and a new hope in his jaded soul. There was no doubt now, no
groping for a sustaining hand. Alice had understood him, and Alice
alone, when all the world assailed him for his secret, and would have
torn it from his lips in shame. She had given him the sympathy, for the
lack of which he must have fallen; the support, for the want of which he
must have been lost.

For a trying moment that afternoon he had forgotten, almost, that he was
a gentleman, and under a gentleman's obligation. There had been so much
uncertainty, and fear, and so many clouded days. But a man had no
excuse, he contended in his new strength, even under the direst
pressure, to lose sight of the fact that he was a gentleman. Morgan had
done that. Morgan had not come. But perhaps Morgan was not a gentleman
at all. That would account for a great deal, everything, in fact.

There would be a way out without Morgan now. Since Alice understood,
there would be shown a way. He should not perish on account of Morgan,
and even though he never came it would not matter greatly, now that
Alice understood.

He was serene, peaceful, and unworried, as he had not been for one
moment since the inquest. The point of daylight had come again into his
dark perspective; it was growing and gleaming with the promise and cheer
of a star.

Colonel Price had no word of censure for his daughter as