"How are we to distinguish between your lying and truth-telling?"
Harry was silent.
"The only means of distinction thus far has been our own superior proof of the facts."
"I can only give you my word. If you choose to doubt it I am helpless."
"Will you please explain how your mother, who has left the court-room, I perceive, was able to inform Mr. McCausland that Robert Floyd was disinherited by his uncle and thus guide the finger of suspicion toward an innocent man from you, the incendiary?"
"I had no hand or finger in setting that fire. Circumstances tell against me. I have debased my own word, ruined my credibility, by a series of perjuries, all flowing from one initial folly. I can now understand my cousin's position—the shame of being misunderstood, unjustly suspected, though I am not fortified, as I feel that he is, by a consciousness of stainless honor throughout the affair. If he is guilty, then I am, and I ask—or, rather, I insist—that you shall place me under the same restriction of liberty as my cousin. Let me sleep under the same roof, endure the same privations, until he is acquitted and set free. For if to have had wrongdoing, ever so remotely, in one's heart is guilt, then I am the guiltier of us two."
"The sheriff, I think, will provide you a lodging," said Shagarach, coolly, and after a conference between the chief justice, the district attorney and the lawyer it was announced that a warrant for Harry Arnold's arrest would be granted and that he would spend the night in a cell.
"There are still several points against the prisoner not met," said the district attorney, when Shagarach moved for Robert's discharge.
"It is a new doctrine that a man should be held because there is reasonable doubt of his innocence," said the lawyer. But the district attorney was rigid and the chief justice thought it best, since there was only one more witness for the prosecution, to let the jury decide upon the facts, which were properly their province.
"Forgive me, Rosalie," said Harry, humbly, as he passed her, going out, and her eyes, though they were full of mortification, disillusion, rebuke, told that she forgave him because she loved him.