it was coming now!--but no--yes, she was moving! She had gone into the other room. He hoped now that his case would be one of the last. He must see her. After a while the agent beckoned him, looked at him suspiciously, and said: "How long have you been out?" "A month," said Graves. "Well, I haven’t got no use for convicts," said the agent. Graves waited in the hall. He waited until it was dark, but not so dark that the agent could not recognize him. "You needn’t hang around," he said; "there’s nothing to steal here." Graves waited, then, outside. He feared he would miss Elizabeth in the dark, or confuse her among the other women. The thought made him almost frantic. The women came out, and finally--yes, it was Elizabeth! He could nowhere mistake that figure. He pressed up, he spoke, he put forth a hand to touch her--she turned with a start of fright. He saw a policeman looking at him narrowly. And then he gave up, slunk off, and was lost in the crowd. XVII Seated in the library at the Wards’, Eades gave himself up to the influences of the moment. The open fire gave off the faint delicious odor of burning wood, the lamp filled the room with a soft light that gleamed on the gilt lettering of the books about the walls, the pictures above the low shelves--a portrait of Browning among them--lent to the room the dignity of the great souls they portrayed. Eades, who had just tried his second murder case, was glad to find this refuge from the thoughts that had harassed him for a week. Elizabeth noticed the weariness in his eyes, and she had a notion that his hair glistened a little more grayly at his temples. "You’ve been going through an ordeal this week, haven’t you?" She had expressed the thought that lay on their minds. He felt a thrill. She sympathized, and this was comfort; this was what he wanted! "It must have been exciting," Elizabeth continued. "Murder trials usually are, I believe. I never saw one; I never was in a court-room in my life. Women do go, I suppose?" "Yes--women of a certain kind." His tone deprecated the practice. "We’ve had big audiences all the week; it would have disgusted you to see them struggling and scrambling for admission. Now I suppose they’ll be sending flowers to the wretch, and all that." Eades chose to forget how entirely the crowd had sympathized with him, and how the atmosphere of the trial had been wholly against the wretch. "Well, I’ll promise not to send him any flowers," Elizabeth said quickly. "He’ll have to hang?" "No, not hang; we don’t hang people in this state any more; we electrocute them. But I forgot; Gordon Marriott told me I mustn’t say ’electrocute’; he says there is no such word." "Gordon is particular," Elizabeth observed with a laugh. Eades thought she laughed sympathetically; and he wanted all her sympathy for himself just then. "He calls it killing." Eades grasped the word boldly, like a nettle.