"--I'll be a vegetarian," finished the other. "Cheer up, Mason, and have a potato." He turned to Echo: "I know a girl in my town who's mighty keen to see you." "Nancy Langham!" He nodded. "She counts on having you down for Thanksgiving week. I hope she'll succeed. I'm giving a great 'spread' down at the Mission, and I want you girls to show me how to decorate the place. You will, then, eh? I haven't forgotten how you and Nancy helped me out last Christmas!" He reached over and patted her hand. "I do like to let it soak into Poverty Terrace that I really keep company with 'dee quality,' as the darkies say!" Mrs. Spottiswoode looked at him curiously. "How frivolous and selfish we must all seem to you, who give up your life to such people!" she said. "I've heard so much about your work, Mr. Malcolm, especially in the prisons. I think you are wonderful. I should know how to talk to a Martian better than to a criminal. Don't you find it hard to get into sympathy with them?" His smiling face turned serious. "'A fellow-feeling makes us wondrous kind,'" he quoted. "You remember your Bunyan? I always say to myself, 'There, but for the lack of a sufficient temptation, goes Thomas Malcolm!' Dear Lady, there is many a man in the Penitentiary who would be a churchwarden to-day but for bad environment and good whisky." "And the law's mistakes," added Mason, sardonically. He had been turning over on his finger a ring with a square green stone, and Echo had been wondering vaguely where she had seen such a ring before. "I know a man who's in for ten years, and I'd stake my life he's no more guilty than I am." "How extraordinary!" exclaimed Mrs. Spottiswoode, and Malcolm observed with wicked innocence: "I wonder who could have defended him!" The other smiled grimly at the thrust. "Oh, he was guilty enough according to the evidence. But he was innocent, for all of that. He is the man who was accused of shooting Cameron Craig." The blood flew to Echo's face and she bent her head over her salad. She felt as though she had strayed unwittingly into an ambush where all the old dread and terror from which she had fled had sprung again upon her. "But," said Mrs. Spottiswoode, "I thought Craig himself identified him." Mason sniffed. "Craig was in no condition to identify anybody. I saw the man and talked with him, day after day, for weeks. He was no criminal--why, his very look gave the theory the lie!" A keen, thriving wonder crossed Echo's thought at the blunt assertion. That livid face back of the spitting revolver hung before her mental sight with strange vividness--the surly, wicked lips, the low brow and narrow eyes. How was it possible that such a countenance could assume at wont a look of innocency that would deceive a lawyer, even against damning evidence, into a belief that he was a victim of circumstances? "What is your theory of the shooting, then?" asked Mrs. Spottiswoode, interestedly.