stirred.

"How soon do you suppose they'll be through looking for the evidence?"

"I know what stillness is," repeated Mrs. Peters, in just that same way.
Then she too pulled back. "The law has got to punish crime, Mrs. Hale,"
she said in her tight little way.

"I wish you'd seen Minnie Foster," was the answer, "when she wore a
white dress with blue ribbons, and stood up there in the choir and
sang."

The picture of that girl, the fact that she had lived neighbor to that
girl for twenty years, and had let her die for lack of life, was
suddenly more than she could bear.

"Oh, I _wish_ I'd come over here once in a while!" she cried. "That was
a crime! That was a crime! Who's going to punish that?"

"We mustn't take on," said Mrs. Peters, with a frightened look toward
the stairs.

"I might 'a' _known_ she needed help! I tell you, it's _queer_, Mrs.
Peters. We live close together, and we live far apart. We all go through
the same things--it's all just a different kind of the same thing! If it
weren't--why do you and I _understand_? Why do we _know_--what we know
this minute?"

She dashed her hand across her eyes. Then, seeing the jar of fruit on
the table, she reached for it and choked out:

"If I was you I wouldn't _tell_ her her fruit was gone! Tell her it
_ain't_. Tell her it's all right--all of it. Here--take this in to prove
it to her! She--she may never know whether it was broke or not."

She turned away.

Mrs. Peters reached out for the bottle of fruit as if she were glad to
take it--as if touching a familiar thing, having something to do, could
keep her from something else. She got up, looked about for something to
wrap the fruit in, took a petticoat from the pile of clothes she had
brought from the front room, and nervously started winding that round
the bottle.

"My!" she began, in a high, false voice, "it's a good thing the men
couldn't hear us! Getting all stirred up over a little thing like
a--dead canary." She hurried over that. "As if that could have anything
to do with--with--My, wouldn't they _laugh_?"

Footsteps were heard on the stairs.

"Maybe they would," muttered Mrs. Hale--"maybe they wouldn't."

"No, Peters," said the county attorney incisively; "it's all perfectly
clear, except the reason for doing it. But you know juries when it comes
to women. If there was some definite thing--something to show. Something
to make a story about. A thing that would connect up with this clumsy
wa