orting as the touch of a mother's hand. So lovely
did it seem that it put me into a mind when, for a little kindly
encouragement, I would have said, "You have opened your doors to welcome
me in. God bless you for your insight. I am the man!"

I do not know why I shook my head at my accusers with stupid
complacency. My denial of guilt seemed to me a trivial lie. I had become
a man of wood. I went through my trial like a carven image. I seemed to
myself to be a puppet, a jointed figure, a manikin. In a dull, insensate
way I had learned to hate the Judge as a superior being who showed
loathing for me on his face. The jury foreman and all the rest there in
the court-room day after day were as little to me as a lot of
mountebanks on a stage. Yet it was the foreman, with his red, bursting
face and thin, yellow hair and fat hand stuck in his trousers' pocket,
who awakened me from this strange and comfortable coma of the trial.
"Because of reasonable doubt," he said, with his unconscious humor, "we
find the prisoner"--here he paused and shifted his feet like a schoolboy
who has forgotten his piece--"we find him not guilty."

Not guilty! I was free! It crashed in upon my senses. Suddenly there
came back to me the existence of my little daughter--the existence of my
blood--the fact that I had pledged myself to another crime in the name
of humanity--that its execution awaited me. Damn them! They had gone
wrong. They had thrown me back on the world. They had denied me the
comfort of the law--that thing which had touched me on the throat with
its firm hands and had promised me oblivion. They had left me staring at
the terrible mind-picture of a little child asleep in its crib with the
thing that was me lurking in its heart, in its lungs, in the cells of
its brain.

"I did it," I whispered to my lawyer.

"You spoke too late," he said, gathering up his papers. "You have been
tried. And for that crime you can never be tried again! Come with me. I
have a carriage outside. Where are you going?"

"For alcohol!" I said, gritting my teeth.

"That is a matter of indifference to me," he replied, sniffing with a
miserable form of contempt. "Our relationship is over anyhow!"

His eyes were upon me with the same expression as the others. They
looked at me everywhere. Youthful eyes ran along beside the carriage; a
hundred pairs watched me after I had alighted and the vehicle had gone.
The darkness came on as a kind thing which threw a merc