not even seeming to think, until I
heard Jack Tracy's voice beside me.

"Good Heavens! what's the matter?" And then, calling out in absurd
alarm, "Don't faint, don't faint!"

"I am not going to faint," I said, though I had a very strange feeling
of floating, and his face looked a little misty to me. "I want to go
home. Get me a carriage!"

"But you're ill! Let me call Estrella."

I caught hold of his sleeve. "Don't say a word to her! Don't dare,
promise me!" I shook his sleeve fiercely. He looked quite scared.
"Get me a carriage," I said, "and mind you don't say anything to any
one until I have gone. Then you can tell Estrella that I was feeling
ill and decided to go home."

CHAPTER X

A LIGHT IN THE DARK

Fortunately it was late, after midnight, and a few early ones, dragged
away by their fathers and mothers, were already going; and muffled in
my long cloak and lace scarf I managed to slip out in the wake of a
group of these--hoping they would not notice my being alone--and into
my carriage, evading Jack's insistence that he must see me home by
shutting the door in his face.

As the carriage went laboring off down the dark hill I crouched in a
heap on the seat. If Estrella and Laura had seized me by the shoulders
and bodily thrust me out of doors I could not have felt more utterly an
outcast. "Does every one feel like that about me, even my friends?" I
thought.

All my life I had been taught, and had believed, that only good came of
telling the truth. Well, now the opportunity to prove that had come.
I had done what had been demanded of me, and every one looked upon me
as though I were inhuman. Had all the laws of the universe been
suddenly turned upside down? Ought my lips to have been sealed
instinctively by what I saw? Ought I to have been struck dumb on the
witness-stand? Was it true, the terrible injustice of Laura's words,
that because of me--not alone the story I had told, but my looks, my
misery, my very pity for him--he had been convicted?

I was recalled to my surroundings by the rocking of the carriage.
Great rains, which had fallen lately, had left the roads gullied, and
rough as the sea. The moon would not rise until after one o'clock, and
what made our progress really dangerous, something had gone wrong with
the carriage lights. They dwindled and went out when we were but a
block on our way, and no scratching of matches would make them stay
lighted for a minute. At t