ok
leaning sideways from the box, when I beheld her pause and slowly turn
her head around and peer eagerly--and with what divine anxiety in her
eyes--back over the heads of those thronging about her, until her gaze
rested fully and sweetly on mine. My heart leaped, then sank down, down
into unutterable depths; for in that instant her face changed, horror
seized upon her beauty, and shook her frantic hold on Arthur's arm.

I heard words uttered very near me, but I did not catch them. I did feel,
however, the hand which was laid strongly and with authority upon my
shoulder; and, tearing my eyes from her face only long enough to perceive
that it was Sweetwater who had thus arrested me, I looked back at her, in
time to see the questions leap from her lips to Arthur, whose answers I
could well understand from the pitying movement in the crowd and the low
hum of restrained voices which ran between her sinking figure and the
spot where I stood apart, with the detective's hand on my shoulder.

She had never been told of the incriminating position in which I had been
seen in the club-house. It had been carefully kept from her, and she had
supposed that my acquittal in the public mind was as certain as Arthur's.
Now she saw herself undeceived, and the reaction into doubt and misery
was too much for her, and I saw her sinking under my eyes.

"Let me go to her!" I shrieked, utterly unconcerned with anything in the
world but this tottering, fainting girl.

But Sweetwater's hand only tightened on my shoulder, while Arthur, with
an awful look at me, caught his sister in his arms, just as she fell to
the ground before the swaying multitude.

But he was not the only one to kneel there. With a sound of love and
misery impossible to describe, Zadok had leaped from the box and had
grovelled at those dear feet, kissing the insensible hands and praying
for those shut eyes to open. Even after Arthur had lifted her into the
sleigh, the man remained crouching where she had fallen, with his eyes
roaming back and forth in a sightless stare from her to myself, muttering
and groaning, and totally unheedful of Arthur's commands to mount the box
and drive home. Finally some one else stepped from the crowd and
mercifully took the reins. I caught one more glimpse of her face, with
Arthur's bent tenderly over it; then the sleigh slipped away.

An officer shook Zadok by the arm and he got up and began to move
aside. Then I had mind to face my own fa