great wrong, for which I am
wholly responsible; will you hear me?" I asked as softly and
politely as the meekest penitent ever tutored for the book agent's
business.

"I have no desire to hear you," she answered firmly, but with a
slight nervousness betraying the deep interest she denied.

"I trust you will be persuaded to at least hear me, and then--"

"But there is nothing you can say, as the subject I know you wish
to allude to is closed. Please do not refer to it." It was a
woman's "No."

Mr. MacDonald tilted back his chair and eyed me closely, but not
discouragingly.

"You are supposed to deal in justice here, are you not, Miss
Tescheron?" I continued, not heeding her frigid, uninviting air. I
had planned to deal tenderly with her wound, but soon realized that
my sympathetic beginning had proved more irritating than bluntness;
accordingly I introduced the spice of severity in tone in
equivalent degree as an experiment, and as I proceeded I noted the
interest of John MacDonald increasingly reflected in the features
of his pupil.

"Justice demands that I be heard. Unfortunately, I deserve nothing
here, for I have done about all a fool could reasonably be expected
to do to upset my own and others' plans. And now I demand but a few
minutes of your time to square the account. My point is that every
dog has his day. I shall have had mine as a meddler in the affairs
of my friend when I am through here. James Hosley, for whom I
appear, is charged with something by somebody, he doesn't know what
or by whom, and he was convicted by your father, and the conviction
has finally been sustained on appeal to you. As you alone exercise
the pardoning power, I come before you to-day to have the case
reopened for the presentation of new evidence. Would it not seem
ridiculous to blast your lives or even to upset the plans of the
caterer now forming for the great event next Wednesday, if on the
morning following that date we should read in the papers the true
story of this affair in place of the usual formal wedding notice?
Would it not seem cruel to have it published that jealousy, founded
on love-letters the man never wrote, turned the woman from him at
the very altar? Yes, he never wrote a line of that gush--that silly
drivel--it was a joke; but it was as nothing to the culmination of
the villainy of those detectives who have swindled your father, for
it now threatens to ruin two lives."

Briefly I ran over the account of