“But,” she protested, “you certainly cannot expect me to betray a confidence!  I asked O’Connell to tell me what he had done so that I could help him—­and he trusted me!”

“But you are not responsible for the law!  He took his chance!” admonished the judge.

Slowly Miss Althea’s indignation rose as she perceived the dastardly trick which O’Brien had played upon her.  Already she suspected that the judge was only masquerading in the clothing of a gentleman.  With a white face she turned to Mr. Tutt.

“Does the law require me to answer, Mr. Tutt?” she inquired.

“Do not ask questions—­answer them,” ordered Babson brusquely, feeling the change in her manner.  “You are a witness for the people—­not the defendant.”

“I am not a witness against O’Connell!” she declared.  “This man”—­indicating O’Brien scornfully—­“has in some way found out that I—­Oh, surely the law doesn’t demand anything so base as that!”

There was silence.  The wheels of justice hung on a dead center.

“Answer the question,” remarked His Honor tartly.

All Miss Beekman’s long line of ancestors turned in their graves.  In her Beekman blood the chief justice, the ambassador, the great editor, the signer of the Declaration of Independence, stirred, awoke, rubbed their eyes and sternly reared themselves.  And that blood—­blue though it was instead of scarlet like the O’Connells’—­boiled in her veins and burned through the delicate tissue of her cheeks.

“My conscience will not permit me to betray a confidence!” she cried angrily.

“I direct you to answer!” ordered the judge.

“I object to the court’s threatening the witness!” interjected Mr. Tutt.  “I wish it to appear upon the record that the manner of the court is most unjudicial and damaging to the defendant.”

“Take your seat, sir!” barked Babson, his features swelling with anger.  “Your language is contemptuous!”

The jury were leaning forward intently.  Trained militiamen of the gibbet, they nevertheless admired this little woman’s fearlessness and the old lawyer’s pugnacity.  On the rear wall the yellow face of the old self-regulating clock, that had gayly ticked so many men into the electric chair, leered shamelessly across at the blind goddess.

“Answer the question, madam!  If, as you claim, you are a patriotic citizen of this commonwealth, having due respect for its institutions and for the statutes, you will not set up your own ideas of what the law ought to be in defiance of the law as it stands.  I order you to answer!  If you do not I shall be obliged to take steps to compel you to do so.”

In the dead silence that followed, the stones in the edifice of Miss Beekman’s inherited complacency, with each beat of the clock, fell one by one to the ground until it was entirely demolished.  Vainly she struggled to test her conscience by her loyalty to her country’s laws.  But the task was beyond her.