I do not know why I shook my head at my accusers with stupid complacency. My denial of guilt seemed to me a trivial lie. I had become a man of wood. I went through my trial like a carven image. I seemed to myself to be a puppet, a jointed figure, a manikin. In a dull, insensate way I had learned to hate the Judge as a superior being who showed loathing for me on his face. The jury foreman and all the rest there in the court-room day after day were as little to me as a lot of mountebanks on a stage. Yet it was the foreman, with his red, bursting face and thin, yellow hair and fat hand stuck in his trousers' pocket, who awakened me from this strange and comfortable coma of the trial. "Because of reasonable doubt," he said, with his unconscious humor, "we find the prisoner"--here he paused and shifted his feet like a schoolboy who has forgotten his piece--"we find him not guilty." Not guilty! I was free! It crashed in upon my senses. Suddenly there came back to me the existence of my little daughter--the existence of my blood--the fact that I had pledged myself to another crime in the name of humanity--that its execution awaited me. Damn them! They had gone wrong. They had thrown me back on the world. They had denied me the comfort of the law--that thing which had touched me on the throat with its firm hands and had promised me oblivion. They had left me staring at the terrible mind-picture of a little child asleep in its crib with the thing that was me lurking in its heart, in its lungs, in the cells of its brain. "I did it," I whispered to my lawyer. "You spoke too late," he said, gathering up his papers. "You have been tried. And for that crime you can never be tried again! Come with me. I have a carriage outside. Where are you going?" "For alcohol!" I said, gritting my teeth. "That is a matter of indifference to me," he replied, sniffing with a miserable form of contempt. "Our relationship is over anyhow!" His eyes were upon me with the same expression as the others. They looked at me everywhere. Youthful eyes ran along beside the carriage; a hundred pairs watched me after I had alighted and the vehicle had gone. The darkness came on as a kind thing which threw a merciful blanket over me. I thanked the night. I was grateful for the world's vicious classes, so used to violence that they did not stare at me. I thanked the good old rough crowd, the fist-pounding, the hard-talking, hoarse-voiced loafers whose leers showed envy of my notoriety. And all the time I thought of my child, of the blood of my fathers which, against all my vows, had escaped again, and with the stimulant whirling in my head, I determined to go back to the other end of town, to the house where I knew this menace to the world lay smiling in its crib.