stand and sworn
that they did not know. One of them was a good man, a man of God, a
man he would have trusted with every dear thing that life held. That
man had stood up there and lied. The other was a girl whom he loved,
and who, he was sure, loved him.

It had not been easy for Ruth to tell that lie--or maybe she did not
consider it a lie: he had seen her suffer terribly in the telling of
it. He was beginning to feel that he did not care much what was the
outcome of the trial. Life was a good thing, it was true. And death,
or a life of death, as a murderer, was worse than twenty common
deaths. But that had all dropped into the background. Only one big
thing stood before him. It laid hold upon him and shook him and took
from him his interest in every other fact in the world.

Ruth Lansing, he thought he could say, had never before in her life
told a lie. Why should she have ever told a lie. She had never had
reason to fear any one; and they only lie who fear. He would have said
that the fear of death could not have made Ruth Lansing lie. Yet she
had stood up there and lied.

For what? For a church. For a religion to which she had foolishly
given herself. For that she had given up him. For that she had given
up her conscience. For that she had given up her own truth!

It was unbelievable. But he had sat here and listened to it.

He had heard her lie simply and calmly in answer to a question which
meant life or death to him. She had known that. She could not have
escaped knowing it if she had tried. There was no way in which she
could have fooled herself or been persuaded into believing that she
was not lying or that she was not taking from him his last hope of
life.

Jeffrey Whiting did not try to grapple or reason with the fact. What
was the use? It was the end of all things. He merely sat and gazed
dumbly at the monstrous thing that filled his whole mental vision.

He went forward to the witness chair and stood woodenly until some
one told him to be seated. He answered the questions put him
automatically, without looking either at the questioner or at the
jury who held his fate in their hands. Men who had been watching
the alert, keen-faced boy all day yesterday and through to-day
wondered what had happened to him. Was he breaking down? Would he
confess? Or had he merely ceased hoping and turned sullen and dumb?

Without any trace of emotion or interest, he told how he had raced
forward, charging upon the ma