undulating hills, gazing at them until they seemed like some great live
thing continually crawling along the horizon's rim, and continually
disappearing in the distance. Now he was watching their misted shapes
sink deep into the twilight.

North, by his counsel, had waved the usual preliminary hearing before
the mayor, his case had gone at once to the grand jury, he had been
indicted and his trial was set for the February term of court. Watt
Harbison had warned him that he might expect only this, yet his first
feeling of astonished horror remained with him.

As he stood by his window he was recalling the separate events of the
day. The court room had been crowded to the verge of suffocation; when
he entered it a sudden hush and a mighty craning of necks had been his
welcome, and he had felt his cheeks redden and pale with a sense of
shame at his hapless plight. Those many pairs of eyes that were fixed on
him seemed to lay bare his inmost thoughts; he had known no refuge from
their pitiless insistence.

In that close overheated room the vitiated air had slowly mounted to the
brain; soon a third of the spectators nodded in their chairs scarcely
able to keep awake; others moved restlessly with a dull sense of
physical discomfort, while the law, expressing itself in archaic terms,
wound its way through a labyrinth of technicalities, and reached out
hungrily for his very life.

He knew that he would be given every opportunity to establish his
innocence, but he could not rid himself of the ugly disconcerting belief
that a man hunt was on, and that he, the hunted creature, was to be
driven from cover to cover while the state drew its threads of testimony
about him strand by strand, until they finally reached his very throat,
choking, strangling, killing!

He thought of Elizabeth and was infinitely sorry. She must forget him,
she must go her way and leave him to go his--or the law's. He could face
the ruin of his own life, but it must stop there! He wondered what they
were saying and doing at Idle Hour; he wondered what the whole free
world was doing, while he stood there gazing from behind his bars at the
empurpled hills in the distance.

He fell to pacing the narrow limits of his room; four steps took him to
the door, then he turned and four steps took him back to his
starting-point, the barred window. Presently a footfall sounded in the
corridor, a key was fitted in the heavy lock, and the door was opened by
Brocket