It was late when the jury returned. The dusty end of day completed their dusty deliberations. They settled down in their seats mopping faces, adjusting waistcoats, casting plausible eyes to the ceiling or doubtful ones to the floor. The foreman, it was evident, felt his brief authority. He was clearly sorry that the waiting crowd had perceptibly diminished. He stood, dyed of mustache, mottled of necktie, his hair brushed in the country barber's idea of integrity and truth. The rendering of the verdict was given with his laborious elegance of diction. And, suddenly, under even his smug sternness, the dimly lighted building became surcharged with fatal things! The old drama of youth and society, the old tragedy was as evident here as in any Greek theatre set in a hillside. Those who waited greedily for the sentence felt a certain awe as it was given. The Judge's machine-like voice had a cold inexorability, very impressive. It was like a clock ticking out the final words evenly: "Twenty years at hard labor!" There was a general intake of breath. To some the sentence was disgracefully light; to others gratifyingly merciful. There was a slow rumble of satisfied country virtue. They looked at the prisoner at the bar. Well, did Terry now know what the law was? Twenty years at hard labor! Something torturing made Sard's heart careen like a badly ballasted boat. She got her first vision of the enigma of life. But with Terry's sentence were they not all sentenced? Twenty years at hard labor! Watts working for human betterment, for clearer vision in legal things, yet still under the law. Twenty years at hard labor! Dora, working in the kitchen, always shadowed by her brother's fate. Twenty years at hard labor! Colter patiently striving to piece together his lost puzzled life. Twenty years at hard labor! All the patient workers, thinkers, teachers and trail blazers of the great world! Was Terry in such poor company? Were they not all condemned, all held down, suffocated, frustrated, held back by the blind significance of crystallized laws? Sard stumbled over to the little group near Terry. Dora, now passionately crying, caught at her hand. "Dora," Sard's voice weakened in her throat, "Dora, don't cry like that. It isn't only you and Terry, don't you see we are all--all under the law?" And then the little country court-house became something very terrible to her; she stumbled blindly out of it.