The fire flared up the chimney in great white flames; they emanated from a lustrous, restless, pulsing red heart. The sparks flew. The faint and joyous sounds from the logs were like some fine fairy minstrelsy which one is hardly sure one hears. A sylvan fragrance came from the pile of wood in the corner, the baskets of chips, the pine knots. The doctor left the room, opened the door and looked back. “Don’t you set the house afire and burn up these books,” he said, with the first touch of feeling in his tones that night. The results of the attorney-general’s vigil were abundantly manifest in his speech to the jury the following day. For that body was recruited by summoning another talesman in Rood’s place, and the trial perforce began anew; Gwinnan apparently thinking this alternative served better the ends of justice than to risk the delays and vicissitudes of again securing a competent jury. This decision encouraged Mink, who had been tortured by the fear that by some disaster the case would be continued to the next term. He was not now greatly perturbed by the strange turn which the attorney-general had contrived to give to Alethea’s testimony. Since Harshaw had found that any one claimed to have seen Tad after the report of the boy’s death he had felt confident of an acquittal, laying much stress on the necessity of proving the _corpus delicti_, as he phrased it; and Mink accepted his lawyer’s opinion and relied upon it. He had not been greatly affected by Rood’s fate, so absorbed was he by his own interests; but it was a moment of tense excitement when the testimony again reached the juncture at which, on the preceding day, the unfortunate juror had leaned forward and pointed at the witness, his question failing on his lips in the dumbness of death. Nothing further was elicited from Alethea except that she did believe in ghosts, but that she was sure she had seen Tad alive, albeit he had stood among the graves with a blanched face, disappearing in a moment, lost in the mist. The whole testimony occupied much less time than on the previous day, and as the afternoon progressed it began to be apparent that the case would go to the jury before the court adjourned.