“They are more than dreadful.  I don’t know how I had strength to pull these pieces off.  I couldn’t have done it if they had been quite dry.  But what do you want to see them for?  I’d have left them there if I had been willing to have them seen.  They are for the kitchen fire.  Wait a moment and then we will talk.”

But Deborah had no mind to let these pieces escape her eye.  Sick as she felt at heart, she exerted herself to win the little woman’s confidence; and when Deborah exerted herself, even under such adverse conditions as these, she seldom failed to succeed.

Nor did she fail now.  At the end of fifteen minutes she had the torn bits of paper arranged in their proper position and was reading these words: 

    The scene of Olivder’s crime.

Nothing could be more explicit nothing more damaging.  As the glances of the two women met, it would be difficult to tell on which face Distress hung out the whiter flag.

“The beginning of the end!” was Deborah’s thought.  “If after Mr. Black’s efforts, a charge like this is found posted up in the public ways, the ruin of the Ostranders is determined upon, and nothing we can do can stop it.”

In five minutes more she had said good-bye to Miss Weeks and was on her way to the courthouse.

This building occupied one end of a large paved square in the busiest part of the town.  As Deborah approached it, she was still further alarmed by finding this square full of people, standing in groups or walking impatiently up and down with their eyes fixed on the courthouse doors.  The case which had agitated the whole country for days was now in the hands of the jury and a verdict was momentarily expected.

So much for appearances outside.  Within, there was the uneasy hum, the anxious look, the subdued movement which marks an universal suspense.  Announcement had been made that the jury had reached their verdict, and counsel were resuming their places and the judge his seat.

Those who had eyes only for the latter—­and these were many—­ noticed a change in him.  He looked older by years than when he delivered his charge.  Not the prisoner himself gave greater evidence of the effect which this hour of waiting had had upon a heart whose covered griefs were, consciously or unconsciously, revealing themselves to the public eye.  He did not wish this man sentenced.  This was shown by his charge—­the most one-sided one he had given in all his career.  Yet the man awaiting verdict had small claim to his consideration—­none, in fact, save that he was young and well connected; facts in his favour with which the people who packed the courthouse that day had little sympathy, as their cold looks proved.

To Deborah, who had succeeded in getting a seat in a remote and inconspicuous corner, these looks conveyed a spirit of so much threat that she gazed about her in wonder that so few saw where the real tragedy in this room lay.