“Oh, ma’am, you will take her away, you will—” Mrs. Smith interrupted him.
“Yes, I will, if it kills me I will!”
Here the good woman released her dress from the boy’s grasp and went up to the judge.
“Sir,” said she, “now may it please your honor, I have come down here all alone to see that justice is done to these two people who are innocent as milk, yes sir, as skim milk. They are my friends, neither of them ever touched the value of a pin that I didn’t give them with my own hand. They——”
The judge here interrupted an argument that would have been effective before a jury, and in its honest intensity interested him.
“Who are you, Madam? I do not understand.”
“Who am I? Yesterday I should have been proud to say I was that man’s wife, but now!”
Here poor Mrs. Smith cast a reproachful glance on her husband; burst into a passion of tears, and only answered the judge with her sobs.
“She is my wife,” said Smith, in a troubled voice, “and won’t believe in their guilt, though the goods were found in that woman’s wood-house. Some of them was in the cellar. The officers can testify to that, but she won’t believe a word of it.”
“No, I won’t, there!” cried the woman, brushing away a fresh burst of tears, and turning upon her husband, “not if I’d seen them a doing it with my own eyes. There are things, Mr. Judge, that human nature won’t take in, and this is one of them.”