The Long Lane's Turning

-streaked window panes, and struggled disconsolately with the melancholy gleam of the oil lamps th

that filled the room, whose eyes gazed alternately at the Judge's vacant seat, and at the empty railed space that had penned in the restless jury now considering their verdict

ifting from time to time to give a swift, furtive touch to his collar or a thrust to his wiry, sand-coloured hair. In the pallid lamp

s of the logging camp as "Paddy the Brick," with a history of sluggishness and inebriety behind him. The crime of which he stood charged was the theft of a comrade's earnings

passed, there had been until the last hour a general expectation that the man would be cleare

himself, with his characteristic mannerisms, his unimpeachable grooming, his nice observance of the social code, had come to be regarded as the perfect pattern of his type. Left an orphan at an early age, he had inherited a comfortable property and the income of a city block, and he spent the money judiciously, if lavishly. His Panhard was the swiftest car in town, as his offices were the most sumptuous, though ostentatiously simple in appointment. He had a Japanese valet, and the "at homes" which he occasionally gave in his bachelor apartment, though they might be dominated "pink teas"

appeal to a class which possessed imagination and ideals. There had seldom been a case in which he had not successfully employed a curious subterranean logic-an apparently wilful insistence upon what seemed at first glance the unvital and immaterial-as a preliminary to a swift volte-face by which he turned the evidence at a new and unexpected angle of inference, and drove home the doubt with a brilliant display of oratory which captivated and-for

other and quite as fascinating a sort of entertainment for them, was what he had chosen to make the more serious business-in so far as anything had been serious to him-of his life. So that his apparent disregard of this tribute to his personal

d pregnant suggestion, that longer reach that heretofore had uncovered a hitherto unnoted but baffling doubt. Yet to those who knew him this but pointed to a more effective climax, a more engrossing sensation when the psychological moment should arrive and that appealing figure arise to insert the

ner sanctum and closed and locked the door. The self-control bred of the strenuous occupation of the court room had slipped now from his face, leaving it suddenly strained. There were moist drops upon his forehead but his han

ropped against the dusky shoulder of a dog stretched at her feet, and in her dark eyes was the eternal question which maidenhood asks of life. The lines of the face were cameo-like, and its southern beauty held that particular blend of ingeniousness and hauteur that is the result of the selection and inbreeding of generations. He stood

hat sent the glow to my heart and the fire to my tongue-till words had glorious colours and pictures painted themselves out of nothing. Once it was my own mind that saw a problem as

a better foil than old Maitland for the prosecution. How he has slaved over his witnesses! I might have made some of the testimony that sounded so damning look like a cocked-hat if I had gone about it in his laborious way. For this 'Paddy the Brick' has plenty of friends, for all his crookedness. Half the logging-camp, apparently, chipped in to make up my retaining-fee. But pshaw! what's the use? I can get him off without it. In the last analysis it's feeling, not facts, that will sway them-feeling first, and then conscience. Every man of them must see himself, first shivering in th

ve-its tense certitude, its mental glow and confidence. With an impatient gesture he turned again to the cabinet. "One used to do it," he said; "i

ink had got him into this scrape, there would b

ss. A keen, cold edge of anxiety touched him. Always heretofore, when he had sat with the black decanter, he had felt the wonderful, slow change-the gradual glow creeping through every nerve, the tightening of muscle and sinew as for a race, the thrilling, glad sense of renewed power and unleashed ability and the inevitable quivering rush of lambent images in his brain.

spelled victory for a cause prejudged as lost. And he was to reply-with the final speech for whose inspiration he had fled to that locked cabinet in the darkened inner-office. Paddy the Brick listened with the look of some trapped t

ad just acknowledged-whose aid had been so freely given him in really vital moments-was forsaking him at the turn of a wretched, second-rate case of common thievery! He realised it with a sickening sense of wonder that mingled wit

singular separateness to lie outside of himself-to associate itself strangely with the prisoner. But the persuasion that had so often checkmated justice, the calculated force, the insinuating tactfulness, the living, warm appeal that had had their way in the past were absent. He had a curious feeling of duali

together. With desperate narrowness he watched the faces of the jury for a sign, a tentative withdrawal of stolidity that betokened a quickened and awakening interest. But they sat moveless and impassive. There was a last h

was brief. Then had come the stir of moving bodies and the buzz of whispers-the shuffling of feet as the Judg

m, which, as the Judge re-entered, opened to admit the jurors. They were qui

oke as she turned away, gathering her white furs about her throat with a slow, hesitant gesture. With the sudden stab of shame and humiliation that rushed through him-for he had not seen her there before that moment-something seemed to break, too, in Harry's brain; it was the rigid lock which had been somehow put upon his faculties. The emptying room felt all at once a furnace, and little jerking shocks, like tiny electric currents, were running over him, prickling to the tips of his fingers. Intoxication was upon him, sudden and overwhelming, but he did not recognise it. He had never been drunk, in the sense popularly understood. He had always regarded with wondering distaste the occasional abject surrender of mind and body to the effect

xpression of professional regret. But he did not speak. Instead, as the narrow, red-rimmed eyes stared for a breath into his, Harry's outstretched hand fell at his side and a painful blur swept across his vision. His unsober, kaleidoscopic mind had open

room to the side door, where his motor now waited. "Anywhere, Bob," he said thi

oadway swelled to great pallid moons tangled in a net of stars, and in their yellow lustre the thing he had

he gasped. "He nev