So naive had been the eagerness of the German-American talesmen to get on the jury that Rush had had little difficulty in demonstrating their unfitness for duty. These were too thrifty to go to New York and stood in no fear of their wives, but they avoided the _gemuetlich_ resort of Old Dutch until the trial was over. Throughout this ordeal Mrs. Balfame sat immovable, impassive, her face a white bas-relief against the heavy black crepe of her veil, which hung like a black panel between her profile and the western light. Her chair was at the foot of the long table which stood beneath the two tiers of the jury-box and was reserved for counsel, the district attorney, the assistants and clerks. Her calm grey eyes looked straight ahead, interested apparently in nothing but the empty witness-stand, on the right of the jury and the left of the judge. She knew that the reporters, and the few outsiders that had managed to crowd in with the talesmen, scarcely took their eyes from her face, and that the staff artists were sketching her. All her complacency had fled before certain phases of this preliminary ordeal for which no one had thought to prepare her. The constant reiteration of that question of horrid significance: "Have you any objection to capital punishment as practised in this State?" struck at the roots of her courage, enhanced her prison pallor; and that immovable battery of eyes, hostile, or coldly observant, critical, appraising, made her long to grind her teeth, to rise in her chair and tell those men and women, insolent in their freedom, what she thought of their vulgar insensibility. But not for nothing had she schooled herself, and not for a moment did her nerves really threaten revolt. She had taken her second sleeping powder on the night preceding the opening of the trial, but on the third morning she awakened with the momentary wish that she had preserved Dr. Anna's poison, or could summon death in any form rather than go over to that courthouse and be tried for her life. For the first time she understood the full significance of her condition. But Mrs. Battle, Mrs. Cummack and Mrs. Gifning, when they bustled in to "buck her up," congratulated her upon "not having a nerve in her body"; and although she had felt she must surely faint at the end of the underground tunnel between the jail and the rear of the courthouse, she had walked into that room of dread import upstairs with her head erect, her eyes level, and her hands steady. She may have built a fool's paradise for herself, assisted by her well-meaning friends, during the past ten weeks, and dwelt in it smugly; but as it fell about her ears she stood erect with a real courage that strengthened her soul for any further shocks and surprises this terrible immediate future of hers might hold.