At the back of the room sat Marshall Langham.  He was huddled up in a splint-bottomed chair a deputy had placed for him at one end of the last row of benches.  Absorbed and aloof, he spoke with no one, he rarely moved except to mop his face with his handkerchief.  His eyes were fixed on the pale shrunken figure that bent above the judge’s desk.  His father’s face with its weary dignity, its unsoftened pride, possessed a terrible fascination for him; the very memory of it, when he had quitted the court room, haunted him!  Pallid, bloodless as a bit of yellow parchment, and tortured by suffering, it stole into his dreams at night.

But at last the end was in sight!  If Moxlow had the brains he credited him with, North would be convicted, the law satisfied, and his case cease to be of vital interest to any one.  Then of a sudden his fears would go from him, he would be born afresh into a heritage of new hopes and new aspirations!  He had suffered to the very limit of his capacity; there was such a thing as expiation, and surely he had expiated his crime.

Now Moxlow, lank and awkward, with long black locks sweeping the collar of his rusty coat, slipped from his chair and stood before the judge’s desk.  For an instant Langham’s glance shifted from his father to the accused man.  He felt intense hatred of him; to his warped and twisted consciousness, half mad as he was with drink and drugs, North’s life seemed the one thing that stood between himself and safety,—­and clearly North had forfeited the right to live!

When Moxlow’s even tones fell on the expectant hush, Langham writhed in his seat.  Each word, he felt, had a dreadful significance; the big linen handkerchief went back and forth across his face as he sought to mop away the sweat that oozed from every pore.  He had gone as deep in the prosecutor’s counsels as he dared go, he knew the man’s power of invective, and his sledge-hammer force in argument; he wanted him to cut loose and overwhelm North all in a breath!  The blood in him leaped and tingled with suppressed excitement, his twitching lips shaped themselves with Moxlow’s words.  He felt that Moxlow was letting his opportunity pass him by, that after all he was not equal to the task before him, that it was one thing to plan and quite another to perform.  Men, such as those jurors, must be powerfully moved or they would shrink from a verdict of guilty!

But Moxlow persevered in his level tones, he was not to be hurried.  He felt the case as good as won, and there was the taste of triumph in his mouth, for he was going to convict his man in spite of the best criminal lawyer in the state!  Yet presently the level tones became more and more incisive, and Moxlow would walk toward North, his long finger extended, to loose a perfect storm of words that cut and stung and insulted.  He went deep into North’s past, and stripped him bare; shabby, mean, and profligate, he pictured those few short years of his manhood until he became the broken spendthrift, desperately in need of money and rendered daring by the ruin that had overtaken him.