looked up, her courage
failed, and those who were watching her saw that it had failed. Then
toward whom did her frightened glance turn as if for aid?

"Rachel, it is Gregory Dexter," said Isabel, again grasping her
companion's arm excitedly.

"Pray, Isabel, be more quiet," answered Mrs. Bannert. But her own heart
throbbed quickly for a moment as she recognized the man who had told her
what he thought of her plainly in crude and plebeian Saxon phraseology.

Anne was now speaking. Bagshot's testimony was read to her phrase by
phrase. Phrase by phrase she corroborated its truthfulness, but added
what had preceded and followed. In this manner all the overheard
sentences were repeated amid close attention, the interest increasing
with every word.

But still it was evident that all were waiting; the attitude was plainly
one of alert expectancy.

For what were they waiting? For the confession of love, to whose
"extraordinary words" the New York journals had called attention.

At last it came. An old lawyer read the sentences aloud, slowly,
markedly; while the fall of a feather could have been heard in the
crowded room, and all eyes were fastened pitilessly upon the defenseless
girl; for she seemed at that moment utterly forsaken and defenseless.

"'You say that I can not love,'" slowly read the lawyer, in his clear,
dry voice; "'that it is not in my nature. You know nothing about it. You
have thought me a child; I am a child no longer. I love Ward Heathcote,
your husband, with my whole heart. It was a delight to me simply to be
near him, to hear his voice. When he spoke my name, all my being went
toward him. I loved him--loved him--so deeply that everything else on
the face of the earth is as nothing to me compared with it. I would have
been gladly your servant, yes, _yours_, only to be in the same house
with him, though I were of no more account in his eyes than the dog on
the mat before his door.'"

There was an instant of dead silence after these last passionate words
had fallen strangely from the old lawyer's thin lips. Then, "Are these
your words?" he asked.

"They are," replied Anne.

In that supreme moment her glance, vaguely turned away from the
questioner, met the direct gaze of the prisoner. Until now she had not
seen him. It was but an instant that their eyes held each other, but in
that instant the thronged court-room faded from her sight, and her face,
which, while the lawyer read, had been white and s