And last of all little Katie Lowry.  It was she who found the crack in Bently’s moral armor.  For Eleanor his wife was of Irish ancestry and of the colleen type, like Katie; and Bently had always played up to her Irish side when courting her as a humorous short cut to a quasi familiarity, for you may call a girl “acushla” and “Ellin darlint” when otherwise you are fully aware, but for the Irish of it, she would have to be referred to as Miss Dodworth.  And this wisp of a girl with her big black-fringed gray eyes peering up and out over her gray knitted shawl, but for the holes in her white stockings and the fact that the alabaster of her neck was a shade off color—­faith, an’ it might have been Eleanor hersilf!  It is obvious that any juryman who allows his mind to be influenced by the mere fact that one of the witnesses for the defense is a pretty woman—­even if she recalls to him his wife or sweet-heart—­is a poor weakling, a silly ass.

Otherwise all a crook need do would be to hire a half dozen of Ziegfeld’s midnight beauties to testify for him by day; and the slender darlings could work in double shifts and be whisked in auto busses from roof garden to court room.  Bently was no weakling, but Katie—­perhaps because it was the moment of apple blossoms and dogwood and the anniversary of his wedding day—­Katie got him.  Kathleen Mavourneen, and all!  No man could have brought up a fatherless and motherless girl like that and keep her so simple, frank and innocent unless there was something fine about him.  You see, highbrows and lowbrows are all alike below the collar bone.

And here’s the catch in it.  Bently had told Eleanor that very morning that none of the rogues would get by him, and he had meant it.  None of them ever had—­in all his years of jury service.  Time and again he had been the one stubborn man to hang out all night for a verdict of guilty against eleven outraged and indignant fellow talesmen who wanted to acquit.  But quite unconsciously he found himself saying that this old fellow at the bar wasn’t a rogue at all.  If he was a criminal he was so at most only in a Pickwickian sense.  All the previous cases in which he had sat had been for murder or arson, robbery or theft, burglary, blackmail or some other outrageous offense against common morals or decency.  But here was a man who had never done anything but good in his life, and was at the bar of justice charged with crime merely because some cold-blooded mercenaries thought he was interfering with their business!  Bently was in a recalcitrant and indignant frame of mind against the prosecution long before the defense began.  The whole proceeding seemed to him an outrageous farce.  That wasn’t what they were there for at all!  So swiftly does the acid of sympathy corrode and weaken the stoutest conscience, the most logical of minds!

Mr. Tutt did not put Danny on the stand—­why should he?—­and the octogenarian judge declared the case closed on both sides.  Then everybody made a speech, in which he told the jury to disregard everything everybody else said.