speak of what she knew. The Bishop was an
official in a high place, entrusted with a dark secret. He must not
speak of such things without a very serious cause. But, of course,
there was nothing in this world so sacred as the life of an innocent
man. Of course, when the time and the need came, the Bishop would
speak.

So Jeffrey had pieced together his fragments of fact and deduction. So
he had watched and discovered and reasoned and debated with himself.
He had not, of course, said a word of these things to any one. The
result was that, while he listened to the plans which his lawyer,
young Emmet Dardis, laid for his defence--plans which, in the face of
the incontestable facts which would be brought against them, would
certainly amount to little or nothing--he really paid little attention
to them. For, out of his reasoning and out of the things his heart
felt, he had built up around himself an inner citadel, as it were, of
defence which no attack could shake. He had come to feel, had made
himself feel, that his life and his name were absolutely safe in the
keeping of these two people--the one a girl who loved him and who
would give her life for him, and the other a true friend, a man of
God, a true man. He had nothing to fear. When the time came these two
would speak. It was true that he was outwardly depressed by the
concise and bitter conviction in the words of the prosecuting
attorney. For Lemuel Squires was of the character that makes the most
terrible of criminal prosecutors--an honest, narrow man who was
always absolutely convinced of the guilt of the accused from the
moment that a charge had been made. But inwardly he had no fear.

The weight of evidence that would be brought against him, the fact
that his own best friends would be obliged to give their oaths against
him, the very feeling of being accused and of having to scheme and
plan to prove his innocence to a world that--except here and
there--cared not a whit whether he was innocent or guilty, all these
things bowed his head and brought his eyes down to the floor. But they
could not touch that inner wall that he had built around himself. Ruth
_knew_; the Bishop _knew_.

The rasping speech of the prosecutor was finished at last.

Old Erskine Beasley was the first witness called.

The prosecuting attorney took him sharply in hand at once for though
he had been called as a witness for the prosecution it was well known
that he was unwilling to testify a