He had always had a weakness for corn muffins, and, acting on the advice of Miranda, his mother had ordered them to console him. But William would have none of them. He was dressing rapidly, in a fever of impatience, when Emily arrived outside his door and put her lips close to the key-hole to shout to him:
“Papa says you needn’t hurry down there. He doesn’t think they’ll get a jury until next week. Dan’s used up one panel already.”
William had not thought of this, and he slackened his efforts a little only to hear his sister’s return.
“Mama says stay and have some muffins. They’re lovely and brown—I ate five.”
The fact that murder in the second degree did not carry the death sentence had reassured Emily’s hitherto impaired appetite. Like Miranda, she ate to keep up her spirits.
William swallowed a cup of coffee, and left with the consciousness that his mother, Emily, and Miranda considered him on the verge of suicide. He made his way to the court-house by the church lane and the rear alleys. Public curiosity had become intolerable to him, and he had a horror of meeting an acquaintance.
It seemed only last week that he had brought Fanchon up the train platform to meet his father. He had been proud of her beauty then; he had thought her unique and fascinating, and he had even liked the sensation she made in the old humdrum town. Now, he could not think of her without a shudder. He felt as if she had pilloried him in the public square. He would never be able to endure the place again, nor the people in it. It was too small. Each man knew all about his neighbor’s business. He remembered hearing Judge Jessup say that he found it hard to live in such a “nosey” community. It even filled William with intolerant wrath when a group of little pickaninnies stopped playing to gaze, and he heard the loud stage whisper:
“Dat’s him!”
The husband of the woman for whom Corwin had been shot!
He plunged desperately into the basement of the court-house, and ascended the marble steps to a pair of swinging baize doors labeled in huge letters: