"I?" she laughed again—a low, gurgling laugh, that yet had a tone in it that went to the other's heart and awoke strange sensations there. "Oh, I shall live to respond to your questions. Do not fear that I shall not be in the court-room to-morrow."
There was something in her look and manner that was new. It awed him, while it woke all his latent concern.
"Miss Dare," he began, "you can believe how painful all this has been to me, and how I would have spared you this misery if I could. But the responsibilities resting upon me are such——"
He did not go on; why should he? She was not listening. To be sure, she stood before him, seemingly attentive, but the eyes with which she met his were fixed upon other objects than any which could have been apparent to her in his face; and her form, which she had hitherto held upright, was shaking with long, uncontrollable shudders, which, to his excited imagination, threatened to lay her at his feet.
He at once started toward the door for help. But she was alive to his movements if not to his words. Stopping him with a gesture, she cried:
"No—no! do not call for any one; I wish to be alone; I have my duty to face, you know; my testimony to prepare." And rousing herself she cast a peculiar look about the room, like one suddenly introduced into a strange place, and then moving slowly toward the window, threw back the curtain and gazed without. "Night!" she murmured, "night!" and after a moment added, in a deep, unearthly voice that thrilled irresistibly upon Mr. Ferris' ear: "And a heaven full of stars!"
Her face, as she turned it upward, wore so strange a look, Mr. Ferris involuntarily left his position and crossed to her side. She was still murmuring to herself in seeming unconsciousness of his presence. "Stars!" she was repeating; "and above them God!" And the long shudders shook her frame again, and she dropped her head and seemed about to fall into her old abstraction when her eye encountered that of the District Attorney, and she hurriedly aroused herself.
"Pardon me," she exclaimed, with an ill-concealed irony, particularly impressive after her tone of the moment before, "have you any thing further to exact of me?"
"No," he made haste to reply; "only before I go I would entreat you to be calm——"
"And say the word I have to say to-morrow without a balk and without an unnecessary display of feeling," she coldly interpolated. "Thanks, Mr. Ferris, I understand you. But you need fear nothing from me. There will be no scene—at least on my part—when I rise before the court to give my testimony to-morrow. Since my hand must strike the fatal blow, it shall strike—firmly!" and her clenched fist fell heavily on her own breast, as if the blow she meditated must first strike there.