Then he arose, trembling so much that he leaned for support on the stand before him. Yet he did his duty—the last duty he was ever to do on that bench.
"Prisoner at the bar, stand up."
She was raised to her feet, and supported in the arms of her husband.
"Sybil Berners! What have you to say why sentence of death should not be pronounced against you?"
Nothing. She had not understood the question. She did not answer it. There is a point in suffering at which the soul becomes insensible of it. While waiting for the verdict, Sybil had gradually passed into an abnormal state, which, without being a dream, resembled one. Her spirit was snatched away from the present scene. She was in the village church, and not in the court-room. The Judge on the bench was her old pastor in his pulpit. He was preaching, she thought; but something ailed her head, for she could not understand the drift of his discourse. And the church was so crowded, that she felt half-suffocated in it.
Amid the breathless, pulseless silence, the doom of death was spoken.
Not one word of it all did Sybil comprehend. But she felt as if the evening service was over, and the people were rising to leave the church.
"Come, Lyon," she breathed, with a deep sigh, "it is over at last, and oh! I am so tired! Take me home."
Take her home! Alas for the heart-broken husband! He would have given his own body to be burned to death, if by doing so he could have taken her home. But he knew that, in all human probability, she could never go home again.
"One moment, darling," he whispered, and sat her down again to await the action of the sheriff.