Jail was wearing on him. The disgrace of it was torture to his sensitive mind, without the physical chafing to pull him down to bones. Those two weeks had taken off his frame a great deal of the flesh that he had gained during the summer. His gauntness was more pronounced than it ever had been before. Mrs. Newbolt walked in twice a week to see him, carrying with her a basket of biscuits and other homely things dear to her son's palate. All of which the sheriff speared with knitting-needles, and tried on various domestic animals, to make certain that the Widow Newbolt did not cheat the gallows out of its due by concealing saws in pies, or introducing poison to her hopeless offspring in boiled eggs. But all of her tempting relishes, or such of them, at least, as reached Joe, were powerless to fill his hollow cheeks, growing thinner and paler day by day. He could not eat with relish, he could not sleep with peace. If it had not been for the new light that Alice Price had brought into his life, he must have burned his young heart to ashes in his restiveness. Twice again the colonel and Alice had visited Joe, once to carry to him the books for which he had expressed a desire, and again to bring the _Meditations of Marcus Aurelius_, which Alice herself had gone after to Judge Maxwell's house. Each time Joe fancied that she left a radiance behind her that brightened and warmed his cell for days. Nobody else in the town troubled himself about the prisoner's welfare, for nobody else knew him. Two of the ministers had called at the jail in the first days of Joe's incarceration, in a sort of urging-to-penitence state of mind, just as if they were assured of Joe's guilt by reason of his very obscurity. Joe had told them that he had a religion of his own which seemed to fill all present needs, and did not want to make any change. He was respectful, but lofty in his bearing. So they put him down as a stiff-necked son of Belial, and went away, leaving him to save himself if he thought he was equal to the task, in a manner of challenge. In the face of this clerical abandonment, people wondered over the deep interest that Colonel Price and his daughter seemed to have in the Widow Newbolt's son, who had neither pride of family nor of possessions to recommend him. Joe had not yet brought himself to the belief that it was necessary to take his lawyer into his confidence, although Hammer had made it unfeelingly plain to him that the withholding of any vital fact would be fatal to his cause. Although Joe was beginning to experience a deep and disquieting concern about the outcome of the trial, he was disposed to give Morgan an honest man's chance to come forward and take his share of it upon himself. If he should do that, then Joe felt that he would be morally free to disclose all that took place in the kitchen on the night Isom lost his life.