n itself away from fellowship and sympathy.

Joe went seldom to see his father. He was not heartless; but the citadel
of his long desired and much vaunted manhood trembled before the sight
of his father's abject misery. The lines came round his lips, and lines
too must have come round his heart. Poor fellow, he was too young for
this forcing process, and in the hot-house of pain he only grew an
acrid, unripe cynic.

At the sitting of the Grand Jury Berry was indicted. His trial followed
soon, and the town turned out to see it. Some came to laugh and scoff,
but these, his enemies, were silenced by the spectacle of his grief. In
vain the lawyer whom he had secured showed that the evidence against him
proved nothing. In vain he produced proof of the slow accumulation of
what the man had. In vain he pleaded the man's former good name. The
judge and the jury saw otherwise. Berry was convicted. He was given ten
years at hard labour.

He hardly looked as if he could live out one as he heard his sentence.
But Nature was kind and relieved him of the strain. With a cry as if his
heart were bursting, he started up and fell forward on his face
unconscious. Some one, a bit more brutal than the rest, said, "It 's
five dollars' fine every time a nigger faints," but no one laughed.
There was something too portentous, too tragic in the degradation of
this man.

Maurice Oakley sat in the court-room, grim and relentless. As soon as
the trial was over, he sent for Fannie, who still kept the cottage in
the yard.

"You must go," he said. "You can't stay here any longer. I want none of
your breed about me."

And Fannie bowed her head and went away from him in silence.

All the night long the women of the Hamilton household lay in bed and
wept, clinging to each other in their grief. But Joe did not go to
sleep. Against all their entreaties, he stayed up. He put out the light
and sat staring into the gloom with hard, burning eyes.

VI

OUTCASTS

What particularly irritated Maurice Oakley was that Berry should to the
very last keep up his claim of innocence. He reiterated it to the very
moment that the train which was bearing him away pulled out of the
station. There had seldom been seen such an example of criminal
hardihood, and Oakley was hardened thereby to greater severity in
dealing with the convict's wife. He began to urge her more strongly to
move, and she, dispirited and humiliated by what had come to her, looked
va