They had reached the corner where Antrim should turn aside to go to his office, and the editor stopped and regarded his companion curiously.
“You are a friend of the Langfords, aren’t you?” he asked.
“If they have a better one, I don’t know it. But right is right. I should say the same if Will Langford were my own brother,” Antrim asserted stoutly. “I know you won’t agree with me, and I don’t expect any one else will, but I say George Brant isn’t guilty, and, unless he admits it himself in so many words, I am going to stick to it till the last dog is dead.”
Forsyth went his way unconvinced, but it was inevitable that Antrim’s suggestion should colour the editor’s talk with Brant that afternoon. And the colouring had its effect, too, though not in the way Forsyth would have wished. While the prisoner said little, and no thing of that little that could be construed into an admission of guilt, the editor left the jail with his own assumption confirmed and fortified beyond a question of doubt. Furthermore, he had failed utterly in the renewed attempt to make Brant listen to reason in the matter of employing counsel.
CHAPTER XXVII
SHOWING HOW FAITH MAY OUT-BUFFET A FACT
When a great misfortune threatens, the heavens are darkened and the smaller ills are obscured; but when the eclipse passes, the lesser evils magnify themselves, assuming abnormal proportions in a field wherein they are no longer secondary. What time Judge Langford was oppressed by the fear that his son had added a murder to the sum of his iniquities, the disgrace consequent upon the dragging of the family name into the public prints seemed trifling. But when it became apparent that William was not to be hanged, the lesser misfortune demanded a hearing, and the judge shut himself up in his library to mourn over the wreck of the good name he had builded.
To him in his sorrowful seclusion came Dorothy, grief-stricken and incoherent, staggering under a burden of remorseful anguish too heavy to be borne alone. The judge loved his elder daughter with an affection which was both tenderer and less prideful than that shared by the younger; and he postponed his private grief in the effort to measure and assuage hers.
“What is it, Dorothy, daughter—anything worse than the worst?” he inquired.
“Oh, yes, papa; and it is all my fault!” she sobbed, leaning against the high mantel and covering her face with her hands.
“Your fault? But I don’t understand. What is it that is your fault?”