Felder had risen. He saw his opportunity--to bring out sharply a contrasting point in the prisoner's favor, the one circumstance, considered apart, pointing toward innocence rather than guilt--to leave this for the jury to take with them, to off-set by its effect the weight of the evidence that had been given. "I will proceed, if your Honor pleases," he said, and amid a rustle of surprise and interest called Jessica to the stand. As she went forward to the witness chair, she put back the shielding veil, and her face, pale as bramble-bloom under her red-bronze hair, made an appealing picture. A cluster of white carnations was pinned to her coat and as she passed Harry she bent and laid one in his hand. The slight act, not lost upon the spectators, called forth a sibilant flutter of sympathy. For it wore no touch of designed effect; its impulse was as pure and unmistakable as its meaning. Harry had started uncontrollably as she rose, for he had had no inkling of the lawyer's intention, and a flush darkened his cheek at the cool touch of the flower. But this faded to a settled pallor, as under Felder's grave questioning she told in a voice as clear as a child's, yet with a woman's emotion struggling through it, the story of her disregarded warning. While she spoke pain and shame travelled through his every vein, for--though technically she had not brought herself into the perplexing purview of the law--she was laying bare the secret of her own heart, which now he would have covered at any cost. "That is all, your Honor," said Felder, when Jessica had finished her story. "Do you wish to cross-examine?" asked the judge perfunctorily. The prosecutor looked at her an instant. He saw the faintness in her eyes, the twitching of the gloved hand on the rail. "By no means," he said courteously, and turned to his papers. At the same moment, as Jessica stepped into the open aisle, the ironic chance which so often relieves the strain of the tragic by a breath of the banal, treated the spellbound audience to a novel sensation. Every electric light suddenly went out, and darkness swooped upon the town and the court-room. A second's carelessness at the power-house a half-mile away--the dropping of a bit of waste into a cog-wheel--and the larger mechanism that governed the issues of life and death was thrown into instant confusion. Hubbub arose--people stood up in their places. The judge's gavel pounded viciously and his stentorian voice bellowed for order. "Keep your seats, everybody!" he commanded. "Mr. Clerk, get some candles. This court is not yet adjourned!"