But even now Hallard and his cronies would not let him rest above ground or Persis beneath. Conflicting bits of Enslee's testimony were published in parallel columns, and his explanation that Persis, in her final rage, had seized the knife from his hand and stabbed herself was declared impossible and unconvincing. Her dying statement, as sworn to by Crofts, stood, however, as the one strong shelter over Enslee's head.
The skeptics insisted that Crofts, being deaf, had heard wrong or been bribed to perjury. None of them dreamed that Persis could have devised that snow-white lie as her atonement to the man she had betrayed. Hallard was obsessed with an idea that if Persis' body were exhumed it would be shown that she could not have dealt the fatal wound with her own hand. He had once organized a campaign against a decision of the court sentencing a valet to the penitentiary, and kept it up until the prison gates were opened and the man gained an opportunity to tell his story anew. He was found guilty again and sent back to his cell; but the despotic power of the press was demonstrated. If Hallard could open the penitentiary, why not the grave in which a corpus delicti had been hastily hidden?
With every weapon in the vast armory of newspaperdom Hallard waged his battle. The political ambition of the district-attorney finally yielded to the coercion. An order was obtained from the court commanding the officials of the cemetery to unseal the tomb where Persis' body had been stored until the great monument Enslee had commissioned could be made ready to weigh her down irretrievably.
Forbes, having regained his courage in his absence in the wilderness, was seized with a mad desire to gaze upon his beloved's face once more and to whisper to her a prayer that she forgive him for abandoning her in her desolation and her peril. Ten Eyck used every plea to dissuade him; but, failing, determined to go with him.
Permission to be present at the exhumation was secured with little difficulty, and the two men joined the group of court officials and the six experts who were to decide from examination whether or not Persis could have inflicted the fatal wound upon herself.
VI
AND so Persis came back again to the world in a mockery of resurrection, back again from the sodden earth to the light of day that had blessed her beauty and not known her sin.
Forbes waited her reappearance in a frenzy of anxiety. It was to him a kind of holy tryst that he must keep at any cost.
Slowly the casket was raised; one by one the screws in the coffin-lid were removed, and at last the board was removed from over the white, white face. Some impulse of protection led Ten Eyck to thrust Forbes back until he himself had taken the first look. He gazed and groaned at the havoc death had wrought in all that beauty. When Forbes pressed forward, Ten Eyck whirled and clapped his hands over Forbes' eyes and dragged him aside, whispering huskily: