with some guilty knowledge,--but there was no evidence against him, he
had credibly accounted for himself on that Thanksgiving afternoon, and
North for the hundredth time dismissed him with the exclamation: "Marsh
Langham a murderer? Impossible!"

The first cold rays of light, announcing the belated winter's dawn,
touched with gray fingers the still grayer face of the sleepless
prisoner. Out of the shadows that they coined came a vision of Evelyn
Langham. And again for the hundredth time, North was torn between the
belief that she, by her testimony, might save him and the unconquerable
determination to keep from Elizabeth Herbert the knowledge of his affair
with Langham's wife. Better end his worthless existence than touch her
fair life with this scandal. But of what was Evelyn Langham thinking
during the days of his trial? What if she should voluntarily break her
silence! Should he not send for her--there was a sound at his door.
North started to his feet only to see the fat round face of the deputy
sheriff as he came bringing the morning's hot coffee and thick buttered
bread.

The town bell was ringing for nine o'clock when the deputy sheriff again
appeared to escort him into court, and as they entered the room North
saw that it was packed to the doors. His appearance won a moment of
oppressive silence, then came the shuffling of feet and the hum of
whispered conversation.

At the back of the room sat Marshall Langham. He was huddled up in a
splint-bottomed chair a deputy had placed for him at one end of the last
row of benches. Absorbed and aloof, he spoke with no one, he rarely
moved except to mop his face with his handkerchief. His eyes were fixed
on the pale shrunken figure that bent above the judge's desk. His
father's face with its weary dignity, its unsoftened pride, possessed a
terrible fascination for him; the very memory of it, when he had quitted
the court room, haunted him! Pallid, bloodless as a bit of yellow
parchment, and tortured by suffering, it stole into his dreams at night.

But at last the end was in sight! If Moxlow had the brains he credited
him with, North would be convicted, the law satisfied, and his case
cease to be of vital interest to any one. Then of a sudden his fears
would go from him, he would be born afresh into a heritage of new hopes
and new aspirations! He had suffered to the very limit of his capacity;
there was such a thing as expiation, and surely he had expiated his
crime