He came at last, walking unsteadily to his seat, with that stoop in his shoulders which had come upon him in prison. He was very pale and thin, with dark rings around his eyes, which for a few minutes he kept upon the floor as if he could not meet the hundreds of eyes watching him and compelling him at last to look up. He had tried to prepare himself for it, and thought he had done so, but, at the sight of so many people,—friends, acquaintances and strangers,—some in the rear of the house, with opera glasses, as if at a play, he felt his strength leaving him, and was more dead than alive when told to stand up and asked if he were guilty. Stumbling to his feet, he answered, “Not guilty,” the words ringing through the room and seeming to come back to him from every corner and every face in front of him. He was very much alive now. The numb feeling which had come over him at first was gone, and it seemed to him his head must burst with the pressure on it. He thought of the band of which Elithe had written and fancied there was a similar one across his forehead and the back of his head,—burning, boring, blinding, and making him lift his hand to loosen it, if possible, or take it away. Just where it pressed so hard was torture. Below it everything was clear, and, without apparent effort, he knew where his father sat, with his mother beside him, her face turned toward him with ineffable love and pity. She believed him wholly innocent,—so did his father, so did Tom, these three and no more. All the rest believed it accidental shooting, and that he was telling lies. This thought hardened him for a moment, and the glance with which he swept the house had in it something like reproach and a sense of injustice. This, however, changed as he met only looks of pity and sympathy, with here and there smiles of recognition. He saw Miss Hansford and Elithe and was glad the latter was veiled, feeling instinctively that, next to himself, she was the one most looked at. He was glad Clarice was not there, but up to the last minute he had hoped she would send him some word of comfort on this day which was to try his soul. But she had not. “She does not care as I thought she would, and she was to have been my wife,” kept repeating itself over and over in his mind during the preliminaries of the trial, which were rather long and tiresome.