placed both elbows on the table. He
seemed to Mrs. Carroll to have grown haggard since she had begun her
recital.

"Found me where?" he repeated for the third time.

"You insist?"

"It is my r-right."

"They found you in--in the jail."

Mrs. Carroll turned away from the wretched man before her and sobbed
undisguisedly. On them fell a quiet pregnant with emotion. The hush was
broken by the crash of a tea-cup upon which Friedrich's fingers had
happened to fall.

"Bob secured the nurses and drove one of them out in the buggy, and the
Doctor and the other one brought you in the carriage."

"Why did they let me go from the--jail?"

"The Doctor paid your fine."

Often during the preceding weeks Mrs. Carroll had thought of this
conversation with von Rittenheim, and the statement that she had just
made always had figured as the climax of her argument in the Doctor's
behalf. Now she felt no pleasure in it. The man before her was too
crushed for her to exult over. He made no comment, merely said,
reflectively,--

"Yes, there was a fine. It comes to me,--'one hundred dollars or three
months.' It is the last thing I r-remember."

"You were dangerously ill by the time you reached Oakwood, and for
three days Dr. Morgan left you only to visit his other patients.
Between the attacks of stupor you talked a great deal, usually in
German, but occasionally in English. From what you said then, and what
Dr. Morgan remembered of conversations you had had with him, and from
what Bob learned in Asheville, we gathered that you thought that when
Dr. and Mrs. Morgan met the marshal on the road after they had been to
your house, they betrayed you to him, and your arrest was the
consequence. Is that so?"

Von Rittenheim nodded. "Yes, it is so."

"I hope it will come to you as clearly as we see it who are the
Doctor's friends, that he is incapable of such a thing."

"Dear lady, even already I think I see it. I r-remember darkly my
trial; how the officer told of his trick to entr-rap me into selling.
Ah, dear Mrs. Carroll, I was anxious to despair from my so unusual
poverty, and I was hungry, and bitten with shame for my weakness--and
hopeless."

Unconsciously his eyes turned to the field below, where Sydney's hair
gleamed red bronze in the sunset light. She was dismissing the men and
horses. A great wall seemed to von Rittenheim to spring up between
them, a wall made thick by his folly, and high by his disgrace, and
strong by hi