Mrs. Trent nodded.
"Doctor McMurray," she said, "I was almost afraid to go to the door when I heard you drive up; I thought the lawyers might be coming already."
"The lawyers?" he echoed, "What, can they be troubling you again?"
"Yes, I got a letter from the district attorney's office yesterday saying that he would send a couple of men out to-day."
"I'm sorry to hear that, Mrs. Trent, for I know it will be hard for you to go over the thing again. I had hoped that when your husband's trial was over they would let you alone. Now that poor Jacob has paid the biggest price a man can pay, it seems that common decency ought to keep them from worrying you about the matter any more."
"Well," she said, clasping her hands and looking absently out the window, "I presume they want to make quite sure. Mrs. Withey's case is coming up again the first of the week, you know, and there must be no mistake."
"But I can't see how there can be any mistake," exclaimed the doctor. "At Jacob's trial everything was so clear, his guilt was so fixed, that there seemed no chance for a mistake. Mrs. Trent, it looked to me, prejudiced in favor of your husband as I was, that there could be no doubt that Jacob gave old Mr. Withey the arsenic and that Mrs. Withey was his equally guilty accomplice. I think this second trial must only be a repetition of the first, and that Mrs. Withey must be found the murderess of Andrew Withey, just as Jacob Trent was proven murderer."
Mrs. Trent leaned forward in her chair. Her hands were clenched and every muscle in her frail body was drawn tense. The look in her eyes startled the good doctor, and, thinking that he had recalled too harshly the ugliness of her husband's crime, hastened to make amends.
"Mrs. Trent," he said, "I am sorry that I spoke so. It was cruel of me."
"No, no," the woman answered thickly, "I am used to that, it doesn't shock me to hear so much about Jacob now. But tell me, doctor, tell me, are you sure she will not get off? Will they treat her as they did Jacob?"