“Yes.  I have never hated any one more.”

“The slayer of your dearest friend; of your inseparable companion; of the one person who stood next to your son in your affections and regard!”

He put up his hand.  The gesture, the way he turned his face aside showed that she had touched the raw of a wound still unhealed.  Insensibly, the woman in her responded to this evidence of an undying sorrow, and modulating her voice, she went on, with just a touch of the subtle fascination which made her always listened to: 

“Your feeling for Mr. Etheridge was well known.  Then why such magnanimity towards the man who stood on trial for killing him?”

Unaccustomed to be questioned, though living in an atmosphere of continual yes and no, he stared at the veiled features of one who so dared, as if he found it hard to excuse such presumption.  But he answered her nevertheless, and with decided emphasis: 

“Possibly because his victim was my friend and lifelong companion.  A judge fears his own prejudices.”

“Possibly; but you had another reason, judge; a reason which justified you in your own eyes at the time and which justifies you in mine now and always.  Am I not right?  This is no court-room; the case is one of the past; it can never be reopened; the prisoner is dead.  Answer me then, as one sorrowing mortal replies to another, hadn’t you another reason?”

The judge, panoplied though he was or thought he was, against all conceivable attack, winced at this repetition of a question he had hoped to ignore, and in his anxiety to hide this involuntary betrayal of weakness, allowed his anger to have full vent, as he cried out in no measured terms: 

“What is the meaning of all this?  What are you after?  Why are you raking up these bygones which only make the present condition of affairs darker and more hopeless?  You say that you know some way of making the match between your daughter and my son feasible and proper.  I say that nothing can do this.  Fact—­the sternest of facts is against it.  If you found a way, I shouldn’t accept it.  Oliver Ostrander, under no circumstances and by means of no sophistries, can ever marry the daughter of John Scoville.  I should think you would see that for yourself.”

“But if John should be proved to have suffered wrongfully?  If he should be shown to have been innocent?”

“Innocent?”

“Yes.  I have always had doubts of his guilt, even when circumstances bore most heavily against him; and now, as I look back upon the trial and remember certain things, I feel sure that you had doubts of it, yourself.”

His rebuke was quick, instant.  With a force and earnestness which recalled the court-room he replied: 

“Madam, your hopes and wishes have misled you.  Your husband was a guilty man; as guilty a man as any judge ever passed sentence upon.”