Those many pairs of eyes that were fixed on him seemed to lay bare his inmost thoughts; he had known no refuge from their pitiless insistence.
In that close overheated room the vitiated air had slowly mounted to the brain; soon a third of the spectators nodded in their chairs scarcely able to keep awake; others moved restlessly with a dull sense of physical discomfort, while the law, expressing itself in archaic terms, wound its way through a labyrinth of technicalities, and reached out hungrily for his very life.
He knew that he would be given every opportunity to establish his innocence, but he could not rid himself of the ugly disconcerting belief that a man hunt was on, and that he, the hunted creature, was to be driven from cover to cover while the state drew its threads of testimony about him strand by strand, until they finally reached his very throat, choking, strangling, killing! He thought of Elizabeth and was infinitely sorry.

She must forget him, she must go her way and leave him to go his--or the law's.

He could face the ruin of his own life, but it must stop there! He wondered what they were saying and doing at Idle Hour; he wondered what the whole free world was doing, while he stood there gazing from behind his bars at the empurpled hills in the distance.
He fell to pacing the narrow limits of his room; four steps took him to the door, then he turned and four steps took him back to his starting-point, the barred window.

Presently a footfall sounded in the corridor, a key was fitted in the heavy lock, and the door was opened by Brockett, the sheriff's deputy, a round-faced, jolly, little man with a shiny bald head and a closely cropped gray mustache.
"You've got visitors, John!" said Brockett cheerfully, pausing in the doorway.
North turned on him swiftly.
"The general and Miss Herbert,--you see your friends ain't forgot you! You'll want to see them, I suppose, and you'd rather go down in the office, wouldn't you ?" "I should much prefer it!" said North.
His first emotion had been one of keen delight, but as he followed Brockett down the corridor the memory of what he was, and where he was, came back to him.

He had no right to demand anything of love or friendship,--guilty or innocent mattered not at all! They were nearing the door now beyond which stood Elizabeth and her father, and North paused, placing a hand on the deputy's arm.