The older man looked at him heavily. "You'd say that. Jack's friends
will. I've been trained to weigh evidence--I must believe it."

"Listen," the young man urged. "Don't shut down the gates like that. I'm
not a lawyer, but I've been trained to think, too, and I believe you're
not thinking squarely. There's other evidence that counts besides this.
There's Jack--his personality."

"It has been taken into consideration."

"It can't be taken into consideration by strangers--it needs years of
intimacy to weigh that evidence as I can weigh it--as you--You know best
of all," he cried out impulsively, "if you'll let yourself know, how
impossible it was. That Jack should have bought that pistol and taken it
to Ben Armstrong's rooms to kill him--it was impossible--impossible!"
The clinched fist came down on the black broadcloth knee with the
conviction of the man behind it. The words rushed like melted metal,
hot, stinging, not to be stopped. The judge quivered as if they had
stung through the callousness, touched a nerve. A faint color crawled
to his cheeks; for the first time he spoke quickly, as if his thoughts
connected with something more than gray matter.

"You talk about my not allowing myself to believe in Jack. You seem
not to realize that such a belief would--might--stand between me and
madness. I've been trying to adjust myself to a possible scheme of
living--getting through the years till I go into nothingness. I can't.
All I can grasp is the feeling that a man might have if dropped from
a balloon and forced to stay gasping in the air, with no place in it,
nothing to hold to, no breath to draw, no earth to rest on, no end to
hope for. There is nothing beyond."