urning white under the pressure, and I knew, if
he passed sentence on John Chalmers, what it would be.

That was the last word I ever heard from him before the trial was over,
and I had to be running over to the neighbors for all the news I got. A
reporter came to ask me one day if I had seen a strange man loafing in
the meadows the evening the thing happened. He was a red-haired,
freckled young man who kept pushing his hat, first to one side of his
head and then the other, and talking first to one side and then the
other of a pencil held in his teeth, so I could hardly hear a word he
said. But he told me that, following the case from the beginning, he
had been the one who had discovered that two weeks before the murder the
man had insured his wife's life in his own favor and that before he had
met and married her he had had a different name,--Mortimer Cross,--and
been a runner for a hotel in Bermuda, and lost the place because, in a
fit of anger, he had tried to knife a porter.

"The police haven't half covered this case," he said, with his green
eyes snapping. "I've got more evidence for my paper than they can get
for the State's case. I haven't slept four hours in forty-eight."

"Young man," said I, "how much do you get a week?"

He grinned.

"Twenty dollars," he said.

"You work like that for twenty dollars?" I asked.

"For twenty dollars!" said he. "What's the twenty dollars?"

"Well, then--" said I.

"It's the game!" he said. "But you don't understand."

"Don't I, though!" said I. And for days the old desire for adventure,
for all the crooked ways, came back to me and made me as restless as a
volcanic island, as Madame Welstoke used to say.

It was then I used to begin to hate the baby at times. I could have
loved one of my own, and the feeling that this one belonged to some one
else, and that I probably never would have the touch of hands that
belonged to me, haunted me like a gray worm crawling through my head.
Many a time as I would be dipping little Julianna into her bath, these
thoughts would come to my wicked mind, and, drying her, I'd dust the
powder over the pink body till the room looked like a flour-mill. I
wished the trial would hurry to come and go, so Mrs. Colfax, who was
writing such pathetic, patient letters about her baby, could return, and
I laid many a curse on the fat doctor for making so much fuss about her
nervous condition and for sending her away.

I could not go to the court a