g before she had finished the
court-keeper and his temporary assistant were lighting the dim gas jets
arranged at wide distances along the wall.

Her crape veil thrown back over a bonnet showing a face, as it were,
carven in grey granite, Aphra Orrin stood before her country's justice
fingering a brown rosary. Every time she paused, even for a second,
one could hear the click of the beads mechanically dropped from nervous
fingers. Strong men's ears sang. It was as if the terrible things her
lips were relating had been some history of old, long-punished crimes,
the record of which she was recalling as a warning. Yet within what of
soul she had, doubtless the woman was at her prayers.

Not once did she manifest the least emotion or contrition, still less
fear. And she made her recital in the calmest manner, with some
occasional rhapsodical language certainly, but with none of the madness
which I should have expected.

She stood up, most like some formal, old-fashioned schoolmistress
reciting a piece of prose learned by heart, without animation and
without interest. The dry click of the beads alone marked the
emphasis. The young Anglican priests towered one on either side, and
the quivering silence of the crowded courthouse alone evidenced the
terrible nature of the disclosures.

CHAPTER XXXIV

JEREMY ORRIN, BREADWINNER

"I had a younger brother, dear to me far above my life" (this was Aphra
Orrin's beginning). "He was the youngest of all--left to me in guard
by a father who feared in him the wild blood of my mother. For my
father had married a gipsy girl whose beauty had taken him at a village
merrymaking. In the Upper Ward they do not understand that kind of
_mesalliance_ in a schoolmaster. And so, for my mother's sake, he had
to leave his schoolhouse, after fighting the battle against odds for
many years.

"He died rich in his new occupation of cotton spinner, but he knew that
the blood of my mother ran in all of us. Once, in a great snowstorm
when the schoolhouse was cut off from all other houses--it was in the
days soon after Jeremy (the youngest of us all) was born, my father
awakened to find my mother leaning over him, the wood axe in her hand,
murder in her eye. He had only time to roll beneath the bed, and seize
her by the feet, pulling her down and so mastering her. He had to keep
his mad wife, my mother, six days in the schoolhouse, with only himself
for guard, till she could be take