Gordon seemed to sink into a stupor and take no further note of what was going on in the room. He turned around, placed his arm on the chair, and fixed his eyes on Ruth, looking, looking! As he felt her hot hand trying to warm the chill of death in his own, he followed every movement of a muscle of her face with hypnotic intensity. When they led him back to the prison van his shoulders drooped with mortal weariness. He had lived a lifetime in a day, and his hair had turned gray. CHAPTER XXXIII THE VERDICT Gordon seemed to take no further interest in the trial. He only sat day after day and watched Ruth. Now and then a faint flush tinged the prison pallor of his cheeks as from some thought passing in his memory. Barringer's speech to the jury was one of fierce and terrible eloquence. Every art of persuasion, every trick of oratory, every force of personality he used with pitiless power. In ridicule, sarcasm, invective, pathos and logic, his voice rose and fell, pulsed and quivered, or rang with the peal of a trumpet. He held the jury in the hollow of his hand for four hours, while Ruth stared at him with her heart in her throat, every word cutting her flesh like a knife or smashing the tissues of her brain with the force of a bludgeon. The jury retired. Through the dreary hours of the afternoon Ruth sat in the anteroom by Gordon's side waiting for the verdict. Minutes lengthened into hours, and hours into days and years, until time and eternity were one, and she lived a life of despair or hope within the second between the ticks of the clock on the wall. She tried to say a word of cheer to Gordon, and choked. The little chin drooped, showing the white teeth, and she sat in dumb misery like a sick child. The man looked at her tenderly and said: "You must be calm, Ruth, dear. Death is a physical incident that no longer interests me, except as it affects you. You are the one miracle of life and death to me." She pressed his hand and could not answer. At five o'clock the jury returned for instructions, and she listened with agony to their awful questions. At six o'clock there was a hurried stir in the court-room. The crowd surged into its doors and packed every inch of space. The jury were filing in with their verdict. The judge solemnly took his seat, and the clerk summoned Gordon to stand up. The giant figure rose with dignity and his steel-gray eyes pierced the jury. The foreman's lips moved: "Guilty of murder in the first degree!" A long breath, a stir, a murmur, and then a broken sob from a woman's heart. Her arms were around his neck, her head on his breast, and her swollen lips in low, piteous tones cried: "My darling!" CHAPTER XXXIV THE APPEAL Two weeks later the judge pronounced the sentence of death. Again the dark figure was by the prisoner's side, alert, erect, every faculty of mind and body at its highest tension, her cheeks aflame with defiance, her eyes gleaming with hidden fire.