He came to his feet with a start, suddenly aware that the slouching figure beside him had arisen at the heavy touch of the sheriff's hand. He took a step forward, the lawyer for a moment again uppermost, the perplexed mind groping for the conventional expression of professional regret. But he did not speak. Instead, as the narrow, red-rimmed eyes stared for a breath into his, Harry's outstretched hand fell at his side and a painful blur swept across his vision. His unsober, kaleidoscopic mind had opened to something that lay naked and anguished beneath the haggard face of the prisoner, something no longer glossed by sullen scowl and sneering bravado--a concrete fact, perturbing and vaguely horrifying, which would not express itself in mental symbols. With hands clenched and a face like a sleepwalker's, Sevier crossed the emptying room to the side door, where his motor now waited. "Anywhere, Bob," he said thickly, "but go like the devil till I tell you to stop, if it's a thousand miles!" As the burnished mechanism shot into pace and the cool wind stung his face, the early arc-lights above the roadway swelled to great pallid moons tangled in a net of stars, and in their yellow lustre the thing he had seen in the prisoner's face suddenly shouted itself to his brain. He flung up an arm as though to ward a blow. "He wasn't guilty!" he gasped. "He never did it, by God!" CHAPTER II A MAN AND A WOMAN The girl whose gaze had for that instant found Harry Sevier's across the crowded court room left the place with her mind in a conflict of feeling. She was nonplussed. She had entered for that last hour sharing intuitively the general belief that the prisoner would be acquitted: a belief, founded like that of the rest, upon her knowledge of his counsel. She had seen no straining for the spectacular in what some had been wont to call "Harry Sevier's pyrotechnics," and on past occasions on which she had heard him address a jury she had fallen wholly under the spell of that peculiar magnetism that swayed all alike. Aside from his continuous success in a calling with which her whole life had been associated--her father, Judge Beverly Allen, was Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, and his father had been Chancellor before him--with his brilliant way, his undenied leadership among his fellows, he had been to her a dominant personality. She had not lacked the masculine homage of a dozen others of their set, but Harry Sevier had always been the imminent figure in her thought, and it had needed no spoken word or promise between them to link her imagination wholly to a future in which he reigned supreme. So that his failure to-day had affected her strongly.