“Then you admit that he did steal?” Mrs. Oakley had taken her up sharply.

“Oh, I did n’t say dat; I did n’t mean dat.”

“That will do, Fannie.  I understand perfectly.  You should have confessed that long ago.”

“But I ain’t confessin’!  I ain’t!  He did n’t——­”

“You may go.”

The stricken woman reeled out of her mistress’s presence, and Mrs. Oakley told her husband that night, with tears in her eyes, how disappointed she was with Fannie,—­that the woman had known it all along, and had only just confessed.  It was just one more link in the chain that was surely and not too slowly forging itself about Berry Hamilton.

Of all the family Joe was the only one who burned with a fierce indignation.  He knew that his father was innocent, and his very helplessness made a fever in his soul.  Dandy as he was, he was loyal, and when he saw his mother’s tears and his sister’s shame, something rose within him that had it been given play might have made a man of him, but, being crushed, died and rotted, and in the compost it made all the evil of his nature flourished.  The looks and gibes of his fellow-employees at the barber-shop forced him to leave his work there.  Kit, bowed with shame and grief, dared not appear upon the streets, where the girls who had envied her now hooted at her.  So the little family was shut in upon itself away from fellowship and sympathy.

Joe went seldom to see his father.  He was not heartless; but the citadel of his long desired and much vaunted manhood trembled before the sight of his father’s abject misery.  The lines came round his lips, and lines too must have come round his heart.  Poor fellow, he was too young for this forcing process, and in the hot-house of pain he only grew an acrid, unripe cynic.

At the sitting of the Grand Jury Berry was indicted.  His trial followed soon, and the town turned out to see it.  Some came to laugh and scoff, but these, his enemies, were silenced by the spectacle of his grief.  In vain the lawyer whom he had secured showed that the evidence against him proved nothing.  In vain he produced proof of the slow accumulation of what the man had.  In vain he pleaded the man’s former good name.  The judge and the jury saw otherwise.  Berry was convicted.  He was given ten years at hard labour.

He hardly looked as if he could live out one as he heard his sentence.  But Nature was kind and relieved him of the strain.  With a cry as if his heart were bursting, he started up and fell forward on his face unconscious.  Some one, a bit more brutal than the rest, said, “It ’s five dollars’ fine every time a nigger faints,” but no one laughed.  There was something too portentous, too tragic in the degradation of this man.

Maurice Oakley sat in the court-room, grim and relentless.  As soon as the trial was over, he sent for Fannie, who still kept the cottage in the yard.

“You must go,” he said.  “You can’t stay here any longer.  I want none of your breed about me.”