r house. She must have been desperate. But, what I could
not understand was, why had not Mr. Dingley challenged any of her
testimony in the court? Why was it always his associate?

I had a sense of things going on under the surface which even my father
did not suspect. There was plenty of news flying about in plain
hearing and sight--news of mob law preached from the custom-house
steps; news of the double guard at the jail so there would be no second
chance of escape--all these things I heard without their being able to
rouse in me any special interest. My mind was fixed on the
under-currents. I couldn't explain them to father because I didn't
understand them myself, only felt them. I felt as if I and all the
rest had been handled, were being handled now, by a baffling and subtle
power which one could not lay hands upon, because it seemed, as if by
magic, to be able to erase the evidence of its action.

There was no telling, I thought, what the Spanish Woman might not
manage to do. Yes, even though I seemed to be safe; for hadn't she, in
a fashion, conjured me out of Mr. Dingley's protection? Her power of
persuasion--it was that which was her magic! Thus far father was the
only one who seemed untouched by it. Even I had felt the pressure of
it. Those appeals she had made when she had begged me to remember how
Johnny Montgomery had implored me, as she said, with his look, to be
silent--they had nearly undone me, and still they haunted me.

"But I don't believe he wanted it, I don't believe he would want
anything so cowardly! and I know I do not want him at that price."
This last reflection of mine astonished myself. What could I have
meant by that? Oh, of course, that I did not want him released at that
price! But was it probable that whether he were released or convicted
it would be in any way for my happiness? Suppose, with her dark power,
she was going to be the enchantress to-morrow. Was she again going to
scatter, in some unforeseen and uncombatible way, all my testimony, and
triumphantly see the prisoner acquitted? Oughtn't I to be glad that he
would be free? Ah, that was the strange part of it! For it appeared
to me that in such an acquittal there would be something doubly guilty;
something that would send him out of the court under a deeper shadow
than ever he had found in prison; something that would pledge him to
her for ever. It was that last thought of all I could least endure.