In her abyss of torture she felt the tense expectancy stirring audibly in the room like a still breeze in forest leaves--saw the averted faces of the jury as they rose to file out. She caught but a glimpse of the prisoner, as the sheriff touched his arm and led the way quickly to the door through which he had been brought. It opened and closed upon them, and the tension of the packed room broke all at once in a great respiration of relief and a buzz of conversation. A voice spoke beside her. It was Doctor Brent. "Come with me," he said. "Felder asked me to watch for you. We can wait in the judge's room." CHAPTER XLVIII THE VERDICT Meanwhile in the narrow cell Harry was alone with his bitterness. His judicial sense, keenly alive, from the very first had appreciated the woeful weakness, evidentially speaking, of his position. He had no illusions on this score. A little while--after such deliberation as was decent and seemly--and he would be a condemned criminal, waiting in the shadow of the hempen noose. In such localities justice was swift. There would be scant time between verdict and penalty--not enough, doubtless, for the problem to solve itself. For the only solution possible was Hugh's dying in the hospital at Aniston. So long as the other lived, he must play out the rôle. And if Hugh did die, but died too late? What a satire on truth and justice! The same error which put the rope about his own neck would fold the real Hugh in the odor of sanctity. He would lie in the little jail yard in a felon's grave, and Hugh in the cemetery on the hill, beneath a marble monument erected by St. James Parish to the Reverend Henry Sanderson. He was in an _impasse_. In the dock, or in the cell with the death-watch sitting at its door, it was all one. He had elected the path, and if it led to the bleak edge of life, to the barren abyss of shame, he must tread it. His own life--he had come in his thinking to a point where that mattered least of all. Harry Sanderson, the vanished rector of St. James, mattered. And Jessica! On the cot lay a slender blue-bound book--Tennyson's _Becket_. She had sent it to him, in a hamper of her favorites, some days before. He picked it up and held it in his hand, touching the limp leather gently. It was as soft as her cheek, and there was about the leaves a hint of that intangible perfume that his mind always associated with her-- ... the smell of the jasmin-flower That she used to wear in her breast! Far more than his life, more than the name and fame of the Reverend Henry Sanderson, she mattered! Could he write it for her eye, the whole truth, so that sometime--afterward--the bishop might know, and the blot be erased from his career? Impossible! With Hugh buried in Aniston and he in Smoky Mountain, who was there but would smile at such a tale? She might shout it to the world, and it would answer with derision. And what comfort would the truth be to her?