hough you didn't look as if you were enjoying
yourself. I picked up an impression that you had your back to the wall;
seemed to me the jury rather sized it up that way, Mott."

"We'll know what the jury thinks in a few days."

"Shall we?" the other laughed aloud. "Now, I'm wondering whether we
shall know what they really think."

"If you mean that the jury has been tampered with it is your duty to
place your evidence before the court, Mr. Ridgway."

"When I hear the verdict I'll tell you what I think about the jury,"
returned the president of the Ore-producing Company, with easy
impudence as he passed into the elevator.

At the second floor Waring left it and turned toward the ladies'
parlor. It had seemed to him that Aline had looked very tired and frail
at the morning session, and he wanted to see Virginia about arranging
to have them take a long drive into the country that afternoon. He had
sent his card up with a penciled note to the effect that he would wait
for her in the parlor.

But when he stepped through the double doorway of the ornate room it
was to become aware of a prior occupant. She was reclining on a divan
at the end of the large public room. Neither lying nor sitting, but
propped up among a dozen pillows with head and limbs inert and the long
lashes drooped on the white cheeks, Aline looked the pathetic figure of
a child fallen asleep from sheer exhaustion after a long strain.

Since he was the man he was, unhampered by any too fine sense of what
was fitting, he could no more help approaching than he could help the
passionate pulse of pity that stirred in his heart at sight of her
forlorn weariness.

Her eyes opened to find his grave compassion looking down at her. She
showed no surprise at his presence, though she had not previously known
of it. Nor did she move by even so much as the stir of a limb.

"This is wearing you out," he said, after the long silence in which her
gaze was lost helplessly in his. "You must go home--away from it all.
You must forget it, and if it ever crosses your mind think of it as
something with which you have no concern."

"How can I do that--now."

The last word slipped out not of her will, but from an undisciplined
heart. It stood for the whole tangled story of her troubles: the
unloved marriage which had bereft her of her heritage of youth and joy,
the love that had found her too late and was so poignant a fount of
distress to her, the web of untoward circum