"Then," she cried, "you must have been convinced,--Ah!" she hurriedly interposed, with a sudden look of distrust, "you are not amusing yourself with me, are you, Mr. Orcutt? So many traps have been laid for me from time to time, I dare not trust the truth of my best friend. Swear you believe Craik Mansell to have thought this of me! Swear you have seen this dark thing lying in his soul, or I----" "What?" "Will confront him myself with the question, if I have to tear down the walls of the prison to reach him. His mind I must and will know." "Very well, then, you do. I have told you," declared Mr. Orcutt. "Swearing would not make it any more true." Lifting her face to heaven, she suddenly fell on her knees. "O God!" she murmured, "help me to bear this great joy!" "_Joy!_" The icy tone, the fierce surprise it expressed, started her at once to her feet. "Yes," she murmured, "joy! Don't you see that if he thinks me guilty, he _must_ be innocent? I am willing to perish and fall from the ranks of good men and honorable women to be sure of a fact like this!" "Imogene, Imogene, would you drive me mad?" She did not seem to hear. "Craik, are you guiltless, then?" she was saying. "Is the past all a dream! Are we two nothing but victims of dread and awful circumstances? Oh, we will see; life is not ended yet!" And with a burst of hope that seemed to transfigure her into another woman, she turned toward the lawyer with the cry: "If he is innocent, he can be saved. Nothing that has been done by him or me can hurt him if this be so. God who watches over this crime has His eye on the guilty one. Though his sin be hidden under a mountain of deceit, it will yet come forth. Guilt like his cannot remain hidden." "You did not think this when you faced the court this morning with perjury on your lips," came in slow, ironical tones from her companion. "Heaven sometimes accepts a sacrifice," she returned. "But who will sacrifice himself for a man who could let the trial of one he knew to be innocent go on unhindered?" "Who, indeed!" came in almost stifled tones from the lawyer's lips. "If a stranger and not Craik Mansell slew Mrs. Clemmens," she went on, "and nothing but an incomprehensible train of coincidences unites him and me to this act of violence, then may God remember the words of the widow, and in His almighty power call down such a doom----" She ended with a gasp. Mr. Orcutt, with a sudden movement, had laid his hand upon her lips. "Hush!" he said, "let no curses issue from _your_ mouth. The guilty can perish without that." Releasing herself from him in alarm, she drew back, her eyes slowly dilating as she noted the dead whiteness that had settled over his face, and taken even the hue of life from his nervously trembling lip.