Mrs. Godwin was on her feet in a moment.

“Once my intuition was not wrong though all science and law was against me,” she pleaded with Kennedy.  There was a gentleness in her tone that fell like a soft rain on the surging passions of those who had wronged her so shamefully.  “Professor Kennedy, Miriam could not have forged—­”

Kennedy smiled.  “Science was not against you, Mrs. Godwin.  Ignorance was against you.  And your intuition does not go contrary to science this time, either.”

It was a splendid exhibition of fine feeling which Kennedy waited to have impressed on the Elmores, as though burning it into their minds.

“Miriam Elmore knew that her brothers had forged a will and hidden it.  To expose them was to convict them of a crime.  She kept their secret, which was the secret of all three.  She even tried to hide the finger-prints which would have branded her brothers.

“For ptomaine poisoning had unexpectedly hastened the end of old Mr. Godwin.  Then gossip and the ‘scientists’ did the rest.  It was accidental, but Bradford and Lambert Elmore were willing to let events take their course and declare genuine the forgery which they had made so skilfully, even though it convicted an innocent man of murder and killed his faithful wife.  As soon as the courts can be set in motion to correct an error of science by the truth of later science, Sing Sing will lose one prisoner from the death house and gain two forgers in his place.”

Mrs. Godwin stood before us, radiant.  But as Kennedy’s last words sank into her mind, her face clouded.

“Must—­must it be an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth?” she pleaded eagerly.  “Must that grim prison take in others, even if my husband goes free?”

Kennedy looked at her long and earnestly, as if to let the beauty of her character, trained by its long suffering, impress itself on his mind indelibly.

He shook his head slowly.

“I’m afraid there is no other way, Mrs. Godwin,” he said gently taking her arm and leaving the others to be dealt with by a constable whom he had dozing in the hotel lobby.

“Kahn is going up to Albany to get the pardon—­there can be no doubt about it now,” he added.  “Mrs. Godwin, if you care to do so, you may stay here at the hotel, or you may go down with us on the midnight train as far as Ossining.  I will wire ahead for a conveyance to meet you at the station.  Mr. Jameson and I must go on to New York.”

“The nearer I am to Sanford now, the happier I shall be,” she answered, bravely keeping back the tears of happiness.

The ride down to New York, after our train left Ossining, was accomplished in a day coach in which our fellow passengers slept in every conceivable attitude of discomfort.

Yet late, or rather early, as it was, we found plenty of life still in the great city that never sleeps.  Tired, exhausted, I was at least glad to feel that finally we were at home.