“We feel it our duty, as the one independent paper of this city, to insist upon the right of a man to the consideration of the public till a jury of his peers has pronounced upon his guilt and thus rendered him a criminal before the law.  The way our hitherto sufficiently respected citizen, John Scoville, has been maligned and his every fault and failing magnified for the delectation of a greedy public is unworthy of a Christian community.  No man saw him kill Algernon Etheridge, and he himself denies most strenuously that he did so, yet from the first moment of his arrest till now, not a voice has been raised in his favour, or the least account taken of his defence.  Yet he is the husband of an estimable wife and the father of a child of such exceptional loveliness that she has been the petted darling of high and low ever since John Scoville became the proprietor of Claymore Tavern.

“Give the man a chance.  It is our wish to see justice vindicated and the guilty punished; but not before the jury has pronounced its verdict.”

“The Star was his only friend,” sighed Deborah Scoville, as she laid this clipping aside and took up another headed by a picture of her husband.  This picture she subjected to the same scrutiny she had just given to her own reflection in the glass:  “Seeing him anew,” as she said to herself, “after all these years of determined forgetfulness.”

It was not an unhandsome face.  Indeed, it was his good looks which had prevailed over her judgment in the early days of their courtship.  Reuther had inherited her harmony of feature from him,- -the chiselled nose, the well-modelled chin, and all the other physical graces which had made him a fine figure behind his bar.  But even with the softening of her feelings towards him since she had thus set herself up in his defence, Deborah could not fail to perceive under all these surface attractions an expression of unreliability, or, as some would say, of actual cruelty.  Ruddy-haired and fair of skin, he should have had an optimistic temperament; but, on the contrary, he was of a gloomy nature, and only infrequently social.  No company was better for his being in it.  Never had she seen any man sit out the evening with him without effort.  Yet the house had prospered.  How often had she said to herself, in noting these facts:  “Yet the house prospers!” There was always money in the till even when the patronage was small.  Their difficulties were never financial ones.  She was still living on the proceeds of what they had laid by in those old days.

Her mind continued to plunge back.  He had had no business worries; yet his temper was always uncertain.  She had not often suffered from it herself, for her ascendency over men extended even to him.  But Reuther had shrunk before it more than once—­the gentle Reuther, who was the refined, the etherealised picture of himself.  And he had loved the child as well as he could love anybody.  Great gusts