William swallowed a cup of coffee, and left with the consciousness that his mother, Emily, and Miranda considered him on the verge of suicide. He made his way to the court-house by the church lane and the rear alleys. Public curiosity had become intolerable to him, and he had a horror of meeting an acquaintance. It seemed only last week that he had brought Fanchon up the train platform to meet his father. He had been proud of her beauty then; he had thought her unique and fascinating, and he had even liked the sensation she made in the old humdrum town. Now, he could not think of her without a shudder. He felt as if she had pilloried him in the public square. He would never be able to endure the place again, nor the people in it. It was too small. Each man knew all about his neighbor’s business. He remembered hearing Judge Jessup say that he found it hard to live in such a “nosey” community. It even filled William with intolerant wrath when a group of little pickaninnies stopped playing to gaze, and he heard the loud stage whisper: “Dat’s him!” The husband of the woman for whom Corwin had been shot! He plunged desperately into the basement of the court-house, and ascended the marble steps to a pair of swinging baize doors labeled in huge letters: CRIMINAL COURT No. 1. The room, a large one at the northeast corner of the old building, was crowded to suffocation. The windows were all open, and from them one could see the sunshine on the broad leaves of the mulberry-tree in the quadrangle. Judge Barbour, a cousin of the doctor’s, was on the bench, and William recognized a group of reporters below him, on one side. On the other side Daniel was challenging a juror, his face tense and one long forefinger pointing at the man. William had not seen his brother in court for a long time, and he had a curious feeling that this white-faced, tense lawyer wasn’t his brother at all. It seemed to him that there had been a metamorphosis, that some magic had been at work, that this wasn’t lame Dan, the brother whom he had rather discounted. Here was a face so pre-eminently a face of power that William gaped at it, as the pickaninnies outside the court-house had gaped at him. He could feel, too, that Daniel was holding the crowded room, and that the men and boys on the window-sills, and out roosting in the mulberry branches that overlooked the court-room, were all drawn by the magic of his tongue. Slowly, deliberately, using all his privilege of challenge, Daniel was picking his jury, while Judge Jessup, senior counsel for the defense, sat between Mr. Carter and the prisoner at the dock. Reluctantly, with a feeling of personal shame, William turned his eyes slowly toward his young brother--the boy who was suffering vicariously for him.