shoulder; "your tale is yet to be proved,--I believe it not. Treat him as
innocent, I pray,--I command,--till you have shown him guilty."

"Away, uncle!" said the fiery Walter; "he is my father's murderer. God
hath given justice to my hands." These words, uttered in a lower key
than before, were but indistinctly heard by Aram through the massy door.

"Open, or we force our entrance!" shouted Walter again; and Aram,
speaking for the first time, replied in a clear and sonorous voice, so
that an angel, had one spoken, could not have more deeply impressed the
heart of Rowland Lester with a conviction of the student's innocence,

"Who knocks so rudely? What means this violence? I open my doors to my
friends. Is it a friend who asks it?"

"I ask it," said Rowland Lester, in a trembling and agitated voice.
"There seems some dreadful mistake: come forth, Eugene, and rectify it by
a word."

Is it you, Rowland Lester? It is enough. I was but with my books, and
had secured myself from intrusion. Enter." The bar was withdrawn, the
door was burst open, and even Walter Lester, even the officers of justice
with him, drew back for a moment as they beheld the lofty brow, the
majestic presence, the features so unutterably calm, of Eugene Aram.
"What want you, sirs?" said he, unmoved and unfaltering, though in the
officers of justice he recognized faces he had known before, and in that
distant town in which all that he dreaded in the past lay treasured up.
At the sound of his voice the spell that for an instant had arrested the
step of the avenging son melted away.