"You refuse the crumb of credit I was willing to allow you," said the sheriff. "Well, I put no limit to what any man's conscience may prescribe to itself, when once it begins to set up rules for its own guidance. Let us get to business. What has the woman to say?" The woman had much to say. It was the early afternoon of mid-March when Aphra began to speak, and long before she had finished the court-keeper and his temporary assistant were lighting the dim gas jets arranged at wide distances along the wall. Her crape veil thrown back over a bonnet showing a face, as it were, carven in grey granite, Aphra Orrin stood before her country's justice fingering a brown rosary. Every time she paused, even for a second, one could hear the click of the beads mechanically dropped from nervous fingers. Strong men's ears sang. It was as if the terrible things her lips were relating had been some history of old, long-punished crimes, the record of which she was recalling as a warning. Yet within what of soul she had, doubtless the woman was at her prayers. Not once did she manifest the least emotion or contrition, still less fear. And she made her recital in the calmest manner, with some occasional rhapsodical language certainly, but with none of the madness which I should have expected. She stood up, most like some formal, old-fashioned schoolmistress reciting a piece of prose learned by heart, without animation and without interest. The dry click of the beads alone marked the emphasis. The young Anglican priests towered one on either side, and the quivering silence of the crowded courthouse alone evidenced the terrible nature of the disclosures. CHAPTER XXXIV JEREMY ORRIN, BREADWINNER "I had a younger brother, dear to me far above my life" (this was Aphra Orrin's beginning). "He was the youngest of all--left to me in guard by a father who feared in him the wild blood of my mother. For my father had married a gipsy girl whose beauty had taken him at a village merrymaking. In the Upper Ward they do not understand that kind of _mésalliance_ in a schoolmaster. And so, for my mother's sake, he had to leave his schoolhouse, after fighting the battle against odds for many years. "He died rich in his new occupation of cotton spinner, but he knew that the blood of my mother ran in all of us. Once, in a great snowstorm when the schoolhouse was cut off from all other houses--it was in the days soon after Jeremy (the youngest of us all) was born, my father awakened to find my mother leaning over him, the wood axe in her hand, murder in her eye. He had only time to roll beneath the bed, and seize her by the feet, pulling her down and so mastering her. He had to keep his mad wife, my mother, six days in the schoolhouse, with only himself for guard, till she could be taken to the asylum, where she died.