returned with a book. John J. Hillyer was
district attorney.

"Are you sure?" Lydia asked. "I thought Mr. O'Bannon was."

The secretary said, consulting her book, that he had resigned almost two
years before.

"But we'd have to have his signature, wouldn't we?" said Mrs. Galton.

She and the secretary talked of it, back and forth, not knowing that
they were setting an impossible condition for Lydia. She couldn't ask
O'Bannon. All her interest in the prospect of this new work had withered
at the name. She felt a profound discouragement. It was terrible to find
she would rather leave Evans in prison than ask O'Bannon to help get her
out; terrible to find that man like a barrier across every path she
tried to follow in order to escape from him. She thanked them for the
trouble they had taken and rose to go. It was arranged that she was to
come and begin work on the following Monday.

It was almost tea time when she reached home. Bobby was there, and the
Piers, and presently May Swayne came in with her coal baron. Lydia's
first emotion on seeing them was a warm, welcoming gladness, but she
soon found to her surprise that she had very little to say to them.

The truth was that she had lost the trick of meeting her fellow beings
in a purely social relation, and the conscious effort to adapt herself,
her words, her attention to them exhausted her. She looked back with
wonder to the old days, when she had done nothing else all day long.

Miss Bennett soon began to notice that she was looking like a little
piece of carved ivory, with eyes of the blackest jet. When at last her
visitors had all gone she went straight to bed.

The next day she had herself driven down to Wide Plains, so that she
could see Judge Homans. Court was still in session when she got there,
and she was shown to the judge's little book-lined room and left to
wait. She had expected her first view of the wide main street, of Mr.
Wooley's shop, of the columned courthouse to be intensely painful to
her, but it wasn't. The tall attendant who ushered her in greeted her
warmly. She remembered him clearly leaning against the double doors of
the court room to prevent anyone leaving during the judge's charge.

Presently the judge came in, just as he had come in every day to her
trial, his hands folded, his robes flowing about him. Lydia rose. Her
name apparently had not been given to him, for he looked at her in
surprise. Then his face lit up.

"My dear Miss