Every eye in the court-room turned. Those who sat near enough beheld two tiny holes, like worm holes, suddenly pierced in the black paper, where the rays of light converged through the tilted lenses. Each had a crisp, brown margin around it. Gradually they widened and spread, as though instinct with life, one working faster than the other. Then suddenly a little circle of flame curled out, and before the onlookers realized the miracle in progress, the waste basket was throwing up red tongues of fire and sighing softly. If it were not for Sire's furious barking the railing of the bar might have caught. As it was, its varnish had begun to crackle before the nearest court officer recovered his presence of mind and threw the blazing basket out of the window.
Gazing at Shagarach the spectators waited breathlessly for an elucidation. Before speaking he walked over and shook hands warmly with Emily. When he turned at last, his words came forth like a whirlwind.
"I think nothing more is needed to convince us of the source from which this fire originated. We have reproduced every circumstance of its occurrence in order to provide you with ocular demonstration. The sun supplying extraordinary heat, the burning glass duplicated by an expert and placed in position by a trustworthy witness, the focal distance estimated by her, the highly combustible fuel, identical in color and substance—can you not turn back in imagination and see happening in that deserted study all that has happened here? Can you not follow it on to the destruction of the mantel fringe just above, the awaking of the sleepy dog, the mad leap of the flames from wall to wall, and at last that whole irresistible carnival of the elements? It was no human torch, but the hot gaze of the sun, condensed through these powerful lenses, which lit that funeral pyre and dug graves for seven human beings. Fate, working out its processes in that lonely room, was the mysterious incendiary toward whom we have all been blindly groping."
As Shagarach pointed upward in his awful close, the audience, on the very brink of an outburst, held back their enthusiasm for an instant. But the chief justice was seen to bow his head, and at once the excitement broke all barriers. A loud spontaneous cheer, rendered half articulate by cries of "Shagarach, Shagarach!" scattered to the winds the customary restraints of the surroundings. Women embraced each other; strangers shook hands warmly; Emily Barlow rushed over and hugged Rosalie March, and drops were glistening on Chief Justice Playfair's eyelashes when he lifted his head. McCausland, standing agape on the threshold of his ante-room, completed the happy picture.
By a natural reaction the outburst was succeeded by a spell of tense repression, amid which the district attorney rose and moved the withdrawal of the case against Robert Floyd. The foreman of the jury announced that he and his associates had long been agreed upon the innocence of the accused, and Chief Justice Playfair, dignified as an archbishop blessing his flock, expressed in his golden idiom the common feeling of thankfulness that the trial had so felicitous a termination.
And so the logic of Richard McCausland and the psychology of Meyer Shagarach were both overmatched by the intuitions of a loyal girl—a girl who knew something about lenses because she dealt with cameras, and who brought to the problem a concentration of thought as powerful as that of the sunlight on the professor's spectacles. Both the lawyer and the detective came forward promptly to pay her their homage; and the last she saw of McCausland he was focusing one of the lenses on the end of his cigar, readily obtaining the desired red light.
But Emily was not holding court even for them while there was still a stroke of work to be done. Her second thought was of Harry in his cell. With admirable modesty avoiding Robert's kiss, she took him and Rosalie by the hand and made them friends at once. Then, leaving Beulah Ware to chat with Brother Tristram, the trio sped over to the jail. At the court-house door they met Dr. Silsby, who came flying along, florid and out of breath, mopping his face with a napkin which he had probably mistaken in his hurry for a handkerchief.
"Is it over?" he cried.
"Over? We're acquitted," cried Emily, using a reckless plural. "What makes you so late?"
"Stopped to nib a quill after lunch," grumbled the director of the Arnold Academie, as he gave Robert a pump-handle squeeze.