he truths she concealed, the
plots she devised with the uncanny canniness of an old peasant. People
not only felt that it was her duty to fight for her young like a mad
she-wolf, but they would have despised her for any failure of sacrifice.

She sat for hours baffling the inquisitor, foreseeing his wiles by
intuition, evading his masked pitfalls by instinct. She was terribly
afraid of him, yet more afraid of herself, afraid that she would break
down and become a brainless, weeping thing. It was the sincerity of her
fight against this weakness that made her so dangerous to the
prosecuting attorney. He wanted to compel her to admit that her son had
confessed his deed to her. She sought to avoid this admission. She had
not guessed that he was more in dread of her tears than of her guile. He
was gentler with her than her own attorneys had been. At all costs he
felt that he must not succeed too well with her.

The whole trial had become by now as academic as a game of chess, to all
but the lonely, homesick parents. The prosecuting attorney knew that the
mother was not telling the truth; the judge and the jury knew that she
was not telling the truth. But unless this could be geometrically
demonstrated the jury would disregard its own senses. Yet the prosecutor
knew that if he succeeded in trapping the mother too abruptly into any
admission dangerous to her son she would probably break down and cry her
dreary old heart out, and then those twelve superhuman jurors would weep
with her and care for nothing on earth except her consolation.

The crisis came as crises love to come, without warning. The question
had been simple enough, and the tone as gentle as possible: "You have
just stated, Mrs. Coburn, that your son spoke to you in his apartment
the day he is alleged to have committed this act, but I find that at the
first and second trials you testified that you did not see him in his
apartment at all. Which, please, is the correct statement?"

In a flash she realized what she had done. It is so hard to build and
defend a fortress of lies, and she was very old and not very wise, tired
out, confused by the stare of the mob and the knowledge that every word
she uttered endangered the life she had borne. Now she felt that she had
undone everything. She blamed herself for ruining the work of years. She
saw her son led to death because of her blunder. Her answer to the
question and the patient courtesy of the attorney was to throw