Echo's heart was beating hard as she slipped into a vacant seat next the aisle, conscious that the man who was speaking was Meredith, whom she had met at tea the day before, and that he was closing his final speech for the prosecution. She looked about her, at the jury who seemed apathetic and a trifle bored, at the Judge who was writing perfunctorily on the pad before him, and then her gaze slipped, half-stealthily, to the long table before the bar, where the prisoner should be sitting. But though she leaned forward to look, she could not see him for the intervening figures. Then, suddenly, the deliberate, judicial utterance of the District Attorney caught her attention. He was rounding to a final period and the meaning of what he was saying smote through her self-command to the last, inner corner of her shrinking consciousness and made the room whirl about her: "The counsel for the defence has attempted to read a romantic meaning into the obduracy with which this thief and would-be murderer has held to his policy of silence. He has invited you to believe that this silence indicates a noble desire to shield a woman's reputation. The name of a woman who thrusts herself, unexpected and unattended, into a man's house at dead of night! The name of a woman the innocence of whose errand is effectually denied by her precipitate flight and her craven hiding!" Echo sank back into her seat, breathless. She listened to the brief, conventional charge, saw the jurors file out, heard the stir and movement of relaxation sweep over the room, yet she was unconscious of the lapse of time. The public, open declaration had seemed to set the final flaming seal upon the incident, voicing, as if with a monster siren, the shameful meaning! She had cringed at Mrs. Moncure's smiling innuendo; now the scathing indictment was burning itself on her brain. "_A woman who thrusts herself unexpected and unattended into a man's house at dead of night!_"--the words seemed to stab her over and over like poisoned daggers. She was that--that woman! She imagined herself rising in that suffocating room and saying distinctly, "It is I he said that of--I, Echo Allen!" She saw herself on the witness-stand, heckled and badgered, faltering an unbelievable story to sceptical ears. There was rolling over her an overwhelming dread, and her hands had clenched till the nails struck purple crescents into her palms. She became aware suddenly that the room had hushed, the jury was re-entering. She hardly heard the foreman's crisp "Guilty, your Honour!" She was trembling, there was a scent in her nostrils like the fumes of poppies, and the room seemed to be swaying to and fro. She turned away her head, daring to look no longer.