"She was in her room, I suppose. She'd been in bed a long time, for it was nearly midnight then." The prosecuting attorney pursued this line of questioning to a persistent and trying length. He wanted to know all about the relations of Joe and Ollie; where their respective rooms were, how they passed to and from them, and the entire scheme of the household economy. He asked Joe pointedly, and swung back to that question abruptly and with sharp challenge many times, whether he ever made love to Ollie; whether he ever held her hands, kissed her, talked with her when Isom was not by to hear what was said. The people snuggled down and forgot the oncoming darkness, the gray forerunner of which already had invaded the room as they listened. This was what they wanted to hear; this was, in their opinion, getting down to the thing that the prosecutor should have taken up at the beginning and pushed to the guilty end. They had come there, day after day, and sat patiently waiting for that very thing. But the great sensation which they expected seemed a tedious thing in its development. Joe calmly denied the prosecutor's imputations, and put them aside with an evenness of temper and dignity which lifted him to a place of high regard in the heart of every woman present, from grandmother to high-school miss. For even though a woman believes her sister guilty, she admires the man who knows when to hold his tongue. For two hours and more Sam Lucas kept hammering away at the stern front of the defendant witness. He had expected to break him down, simple-minded country lad that he supposed him to be, in a quarter of that time, and draw from him the truth of the matter in every detail. It was becoming evident that Joe was feeling the strain. The tiresome repetition of the questions, the unvarying denial, the sudden sorties of the prosecutor in attempt to surprise him, and the constant labor of guarding against it--all this was heaping up into a terrific load. Time and again Joe's eyes had gone to the magnet of Alice Price's face, and always he had seen her looking straight at him--steadily, understandingly, as if she read his purpose. He was satisfied that she knew him to be innocent of that crime, as well as any of the indiscretions with Ollie which the prosecutor had attempted to force him to admit. If he could have been satisfied with that assurance alone, his hour would have been blessed. But he looked for more in every fleeting glance that his eyes could wing to her, and in the turmoil of his mind he was unable to find that which he sought. Sam Lucas, seeing that the witness was nearing the point of mental and physical strain at which men go to pieces, and the vigil which they have held above their secrets becomes open to surprise, hung to him with his worriment of questions, scarcely granting him time to sigh.