He was as terrible and as swarthy and as melodramatic as Othello.

“Don’t, Red,” she called still again, and it was as if her voice came to him from across a bog.

He was standing with one knee dug into the couch, straining her head back against the wall, his hand on her forehead and the beautiful flexing arch of her neck rising ... swanlike.

“Watch out!” There was a raw nail in the wall where a picture had hung.  Murphy had kept knocking it awry and she had removed it.  “Watch out, Red!  No-o—­no—­”

Through the star-spangled red he glimpsed her once where the hair swept off her brow, and for the moment, to his blurred craziness, it was as if through the red her brow was shotted with little scars and pock marks from glass, and a hot surge of unaccountable sickness fanned the enormous silence of his rage.

With or without his knowing it, that raw nail drove slowly home to the rear of Winnie’s left ear, upward toward the cerebellum as he tilted and tilted, and the convex curve of her neck mounted like a bow stretched outward.

* * * * *

There was little about Jason’s trial to entitle it to more than a back-page paragraph in the dailies.  He sat through those days, that were crisscrossed with prison bars, much like those drowned figures encountered by deep-sea divers, which, seated upright in death, are pressed down by the waters of unreality.

It is doubtful if he spoke a hundred words during the lean, celled weeks of his waiting, and then with a vacuous sort of apathy and solely upon advice of counsel.  Even when he took the stand, undramatically, his voice, without even a plating of zest for life, was like some old drum with the parchment too tired to vibrate.

Women, however, cried over him and the storm in his eyes and the curiously downy back of his neck where the last of his youth still marked him.

To Sara, from her place in the first row, on those not infrequent occasions when his eyes fumbled for hers, he seemed to drown in her gaze—­back—­somewhere—­

On a Friday at high noon the jury adjourned, the judge charging it with a solemnity that rang up to wise old rafters and down into one woman’s thirsty soul like life-giving waters.

In part he told the twelve men about to file out, “If there has been anything in my attitude during the recital of the defendant’s story, which has appeared to you to be in the slightest manner prejudiced one way or another, I charge you to strike such mistaken impressions from your minds.

“I have tried honestly to wash the slate of my mind clean to take down faithfully the aspects of this case which for two weeks has occupied this jury.

“If you believe the defendant guilty of the heinous crime in question, do not falter in your use of the power with which the law has vested you.

“If, on the other hand and to the best of your judgment, there has been in the defendant’s life extenuating circumstances, er—­a limitation of environment, home influence, close not the avenues of your fair judgment.