On the first day, although she never glanced at a talesman, she had listened eagerly to every question, every answer, every challenge. As the third day wore on, she felt only weariness of mind, and gratitude that she had a strong back. She was determined to sit erect and immobile if the trial lasted a month. And not only was her personal pride involved. Circumstances had delivered her to the public eye, therefore should it receive an indelible impression of a worthy representative of the middle-class American of the smaller town, so little unlike the women of the wealthier class, and capable of gracing any position to which fate might call her--a type the United States of America alone has bred; also of a woman whose courage and dignity had never been surpassed by any man brought to the bar of justice on the awful charge of murder. She knew that this attitude, as well as her statuesque appearance, would antagonise the men reporters but enchant her loyal friends, the women. Her estimate was very shrewd. The poor sob sisters, squeezed in wherever they could find a vacant chair, or even a half of one (all the tables being reserved for the men), surrendered in a body to her cold beauty, her superb indifference, soul and pen. A unanimous verdict of guilty brought in by that gum-chewing small-headed jury merely would petrify these women's belief in her innocence. She was vicarious romance; for women that write too much have little time to live and no impulse to murder any one in the world but the city editor. On the morning of the fourth day, the space between the enclosure and the walls of the courtroom was filled with spectators from all over the county, many of them personal friends of Mrs. Balfame; but New York City would not become vitally interested until the business of examining the minor witnesses was concluded. Behind and at the left of Mrs. Balfame were the members of her intimate circle. Occasionally they whispered to her, and she smiled so sweetly and with such serene composure that even the men reporters admitted she looked younger and more feminine--and more handsome--than on that day of the interview which had proved her undoing. "But she did it all right," they assured one another. They must believe in her guilt or suffer twinges in that highly civilised and possibly artificial section of the brain tabulated as conscience. Their fixed theory was that she had mixed the poison for Balfame and then, being in a highly nervous state, and apprehensive that he would capriciously refuse to drink it, had snatched her pistol as she heard his voice in the distance, dashed downstairs and out into the grove, and fired with her established accuracy. She had had plenty of time between the crime and her arrest to pass the pistol to one of her friends, or even to slip out at night and drop it in the marsh.