He was in a chair now trying to think. Suddenly what in the excitement attending the arrest he had forgotten came to him. “Elithe saw me, Elithe!” and he groaned aloud. “How could she say so? Oh, Elithe!” Had it been Clarice, it would have scarcely hurt him more cruelly. “If she saw me, I must have been there and I didn’t know it. I certainly am mad, or shall be soon if some one does not come to waken me from this nightmare,” he said. His reason had reached the last barrier and might have leaped over it if Stevens, the jailer, had not come in with a lamp, which he put upon the table. “I am sorry I left you in the dark so long,” he said. “I didn’t know it was dark,” Paul replied, glancing at the window and surprised to see a star shining through it. “Yes, it grows dark early now, and your supper is late, as we didn’t expect company. Sarah Jane has taken a heap of pains with it. Here it comes,” Stevens said, nodding towards the door, where his wife stood, holding a large tray filled with the most appetizing food she could think of. Broiled chicken and coffee and peaches and cream, such as she had never taken to a prisoner before. Paul was no ordinary charge. He had always had a pleasant word for her, and once, when she was in town without an umbrella and a heavy rain was falling, he had taken her home in his covered phaeton. “Just as if I was a lady,” she said, and she never forgot the attention. Now he was there in jail, and she was more sorry for him than she had ever been for any one in her life. Like the most of the people she did not believe he intended to kill Jack Percy, and she wondered he did not say so. “I hope you will enjoy your supper,” she said, putting the tray upon the table and pouring his coffee for him. He was young and he was hungry, and he ate with a keener appetite than he would have thought possible half an hour ago. He was naturally very social; he never liked to be alone, and the presence of the jailer and his wife was company and made the place less dreary. His head was less hot and dizzy, and he talked calmly of the calamity which had overtaken him so suddenly. “Nobody believes you meant to do it, and when you tell just how it was, things will be easier,” Mrs. Stevens ventured to say, as she poured him a second cup of coffee. Paul looked at her quickly and asked: “They mean that I am to say I shot him by mistake, not knowing he was there, and get off that way?” “Yes, that’s about it,” Mrs. Stevens replied, and Paul continued: “Then I shall never get off. I know no more of the shooting than you do. I was not there.”