emptation when everything was going
well with him, fell at the sight of his ill health. She had attempted,
lonely and inefficient as she was, to do the trick by herself. It was
Lydia's irritation over Evans' regret at the loss of the bracelet that
had apparently decided the girl.

"If she was so glad to be relieved of the things I thought I'd help her
a bit," she said bitterly.

What seemed to O'Bannon so incomprehensible was that Lydia shouldn't
have known that the girl was in some sort of trouble. The sight of the
room made him vividly aware of the intimacy of daily detail that any
maid has in regard to her mistress--two women, and one going through
hell.

He said to Miss Bennett after they had gone downstairs again: "Didn't
Miss Thorne suspect that something was going wrong with the girl?"

Miss Bennett liked the district attorney so much that she felt a strong
temptation, under the mask of discussing the case, to pour out to him
all her troubles--the inevitable troubles of those whose lives were
bound up with Lydia's. But her standards of good manners were too
rigorous to allow her to yield.

"No, I'm afraid we didn't guess," she answered. "But now that we do
know, is there anything we can do for the poor thing?"

"Not just now," he answered. "The case is clear against her. But when it
comes to sentencing her you could do something. Anything Miss Thorne
said in her favor would be taken into consideration by the judge."

"Tell me just what it is you want her to say," answered Miss Bennett,
eager to help.

"It isn't what I want," O'Bannon replied with some irritation. "My duty
is to present the case against her for the state. I'm telling what Miss
Thorne can do if she feels that there are extenuating circumstances; if,
for instance, she thinks that she herself has been careless about her
valuables."

"She will, I'm sure," said Miss Bennett with more conviction than she
felt, "because, between you and me, Mr. O'Bannon, she is careless. She
lost a beautiful little bracelet the other--but when you're as young and
lovely and rich as she is----"

She was interrupted by the district attorney's rather curt good-by.

"Do you want to drive back with me, sheriff?"

The sheriff did, and jumping in he murmured as they drove down the road:
"She is all that. She's easy to look at all right. She's handsome, and
yet not--not what I should call womanly. Look out at the turn. There's a
hole as you get into the main road.