Anne was now speaking. Bagshot's testimony was read to her phrase by phrase. Phrase by phrase she corroborated its truthfulness, but added what had preceded and followed. In this manner all the overheard sentences were repeated amid close attention, the interest increasing with every word.
But still it was evident that all were waiting; the attitude was plainly one of alert expectancy.
For what were they waiting? For the confession of love, to whose "extraordinary words" the New York journals had called attention.
At last it came. An old lawyer read the sentences aloud, slowly, markedly; while the fall of a feather could have been heard in the crowded room, and all eyes were fastened pitilessly upon the defenseless girl; for she seemed at that moment utterly forsaken and defenseless.
"'You say that I can not love,'" slowly read the lawyer, in his clear, dry voice; "'that it is not in my nature. You know nothing about it. You have thought me a child; I am a child no longer. I love Ward Heathcote, your husband, with my whole heart. It was a delight to me simply to be near him, to hear his voice. When he spoke my name, all my being went toward him. I loved him—loved him—so deeply that everything else on the face of the earth is as nothing to me compared with it. I would have been gladly your servant, yes, yours, only to be in the same house with him, though I were of no more account in his eyes than the dog on the mat before his door.'"
There was an instant of dead silence after these last passionate words had fallen strangely from the old lawyer's thin lips. Then, "Are these your words?" he asked.
"They are," replied Anne.
In that supreme moment her glance, vaguely turned away from the questioner, met the direct gaze of the prisoner. Until now she had not seen him. It was but an instant that their eyes held each other, but in that instant the thronged court-room faded from her sight, and her face, which, while the lawyer read, had been white and still as marble, was now, though still colorless, so transfigured, so uplifted, so beautiful in its pure sacrifice, that men leaned forward to see her more closely, to print, as it were, that exquisite image upon their memories forever.
Then the crowd took its breath again audibly; the sight was over. Anne had sunk down and covered her face with her hands, and Miss Teller, much agitated, was sending her a glass of water.
Even the law is human sometimes, and there was now a short delay.