But the jury fell short of this test of humanity, and retired to deliberate. Mrs. Bobby scanned their faces anxiously, as she had done at the beginning of the trial. They were care-worn and gloomy--naturally, with a woman's life in their hands; but surely--surely they should look happier, since it was in their power to save her?
"I wish, Bobby," she murmured, with that sob again in her throat, but this time not one of relief, "I wish we had tried if they wouldn't take money!"
"Don't, Eleanor," said Bobby. "They're all honest men--and besides, one can't do such things!" To himself he was thinking that women really seemed on such occasions as this to be entirely without principle, and yet that somehow one liked them all the better for it.
This was at two o'clock. Three, four, five o'clock came, and still they made no sign. The long deliberation seemed ominous to the anxious group who waited in a small, dark room on the ground floor of the court-house, starting at every sound and counting the moments as they dragged wearily along. Mr. Fenton and the other counsel came restlessly in and out, with a cheerful air that covered but indifferently their intense anxiety; Bobby and Julian Gerard stood by the window, talking occasionally in low tones, more often silent and gazing at the prison walls that rose up grimly before their eyes. Elizabeth sat at a small table in the middle of the room, and her aunts and Mrs. Van Antwerp sat around her in a forlorn circle. It was a long while since any one had spoken; all consoling suggestions were exhausted.
Elizabeth's hands were clasped tightly in her lap, her eyes, wide-open yet unseeing, stared steadily before her. Vaguely she was conscious that there were people in the room, that by the window stood the man whose presence might have mattered more to her at some other time than anything else on earth; that her aunts and Eleanor Van Antwerp were beside her, and would bend forward now and then, one or other of them, to press her hand. In a dull, mechanical way, she was thankful to know that they were there; yet nothing they said or did could help her, a great gulf seemed to yawn between her and the outside world.... It is thus, perhaps, that the dying feel when they see, with their failing sight, the faces of friends, and know that even love is powerless to reach them. Elizabeth suffered, during those hours of suspense, the agony of death a hundred times over. But as the afternoon wore on, hope faded and the numbness of despair crept over her tortured nerves.