te of themselves.

When the trial began, not only was Miss Teller present, but Mrs. Varce
and Isabel, Mrs. Bannert and her daughter-in-law, together with others
equally well known as friends of Helen's, and prominent members of New
York's fashionable society.

Multomah, the little county town, was excited; its one hotel was
crowded. The country people came in to attend the trial from miles
around; great lawyers were to be present, there was to be "mighty fine
speaking." The gentleman had murdered his wife for the million dollars
she constantly carried with her. The gentleman had murdered his wife
because she had just discovered that he was already married before he
met her, and he was afraid she would reveal the secret. A local preacher
improved the occasion by a sermon decked profusely with Apollyons and
Abaddons. It was not clearly known what he meant, or where he stood; but
the discourse was listened to by a densely packed crowd of farming
people, who came out wiping their foreheads, and sat down on convenient
tombstones to talk it over, and eat their dinners, brought in baskets,
trying the case again beforehand for the five-hundredth time, with
texts and Scripture phrases thrown in to give it a Sabbath flavor.

The New York dailies had sent their reporters; every evening Anne read
their telegraphic summaries of the day's events; every morning, the
account of the same in detail. She was not skillful enough to extract
the real evidence from the mass of irrelevant testimony with which it
was surrounded, the questions and answers, the confusing pertinacity of
the lawyers over some little point which seemed to her as far from the
real subject as a blade of grass is from the fixed stars. She turned,
therefore, to the printed comments which day by day accompanied the
report of the proceedings, gathering from them the progress made, and
their ideas of the probabilities which lay in the future. The progress
seemed rapid; the probabilities were damning. No journal pretended that
they were otherwise. Yet still the able pens of the calmer writers
counselled deliberation. "There have been cases with even closer
evidence than this," they warningly wrote, "in which the accused, by
some unexpected and apparently trivial turn in the testimony, has been
proven clearly innocent. In this case, while the evidence is strong, it
is difficult to imagine a motive. Mrs. Heathcote was much attached to
her husband; she was, besides, a beauti