Judge, jury, and public riveted their eyes upon Charley Steele.
He had now drawn a little farther away from the jury-box; his eye took
in the judge as well; once or twice he turned, as if appealingly and
confidently, to the people in the room. It was terribly hot, the air
was sickeningly close, every one seemed oppressed--every one save a lady
sitting not a score of feet from where the counsel for the prisoner
stood. This lady's face was not one that could flush easily; it belonged
to a temperament as even as her person was symmetrically beautiful. As
Charley talked, her eyes were fixed steadily, wonderingly upon him.
There was a question in her gaze, which never in the course of the speech
was quite absorbed by the admiration--the intense admiration--she was
feeling for him. Once as he turned with a concentrated earnestness in
her direction his eyes met hers. The message he flashed her was sub-
conscious, for his mind never wavered an instant from the cause in hand,
but it said to her:

"When this is over, Kathleen, I will come to you." For another quarter
of an hour he exposed the fallacy of purely circumstantial evidence; he
raised in the minds of his hearers the painful responsibility of the law,
the awful tyranny of miscarriage of justice; he condemned prejudice
against a prisoner because that prisoner demanded that the law should
prove him guilty instead of his proving himself innocent. If a man chose
to stand to that, to sternly assume this perilous position, the law had
no right to take advantage of it. He turned towards the prisoner and
traced his possible history: as the sensitive, intelligent son of godly
Catholic parents from some remote parish in French Canada. He drew an
imaginary picture of the home from which he might have come, and of the
parents and brothers and sisters who would have lived weeks of torture
knowing that their son and brother was being tried for his life. It