r, worse, break his
spirit and drive him either to a mad-house or the solace of his drug.
It was a cruel thing to confront him with this at such a point in his
life. It was fiendish, devilish. It was possible that they might even
make the boy believe that in his blind madness he actually did commit
these crimes. Then, as in a lurid moving picture, Donaldson recalled
the uneasiness of the girl; the morning papers with their glaring
headlines of the Riverside robberies, which he had found that morning
scattered about the floor; her fear of the police, and the mystery of
the untold story at which she had hinted. Take these, and the fact
that in his madness Arsdale had actually made an attack upon the girl
and upon himself, similar to those outside the house, and the chain was
a strong one. The pity of it--coming now!

Yes, it was in this that the cruel injustice lay. Even admitting the
boy to be guilty, it was still an injustice. The man who had done
those things was outside the pale of the law; he was no more. Arsdale
himself, Arsdale the clean-minded young man with a useful life before
him, Arsdale with his new soul, had no more to do with those black
deeds than he himself had. Yet that lumbering Juggernaut, the Law,
could not take this into account. The Law did not deal with souls, but
bodies.

To this day--what a hideous climax!

Saul detected the fear in Donaldson's eyes,

"You know something about this, Don!" he asked eagerly.

He was no longer a friend; he was scarcely a man; he was a hound who
has picked up his trail. His eyes had narrowed; his round face seemed
to grow almost pointed. He chewed his cigar end viciously. He was
alert in every nerve.

"You'd better loosen up," he warned, "it's all right to protect a
friend, but it can't be done in a case of this sort. You as a lawyer
ought to know that. It can't be done."

"Yes, I know, I know. But I want to tell you again that you 're dead
wrong about this. You haven't guessed right, Beefy."

"That's for others to decide," he returned somewhat sharply. "It 's up
to you to tell what you know."

"It's hard to do it--it's hard to do it to you."

Donaldson's face had suddenly grown blank--impassive. The mouth had
hardened and his whole body stiffened almost as it does after death.
When he spoke it was without emotion and in the voice of one who has
repeated a phrase until it no longer has meaning.

"I realize how you feel," Saul encourag