disappointed she was with Fannie,--that the woman had known it all
along, and had only just confessed. It was just one more link in the
chain that was surely and not too slowly forging itself about Berry
Hamilton.

Of all the family Joe was the only one who burned with a fierce
indignation. He knew that his father was innocent, and his very
helplessness made a fever in his soul. Dandy as he was, he was loyal,
and when he saw his mother's tears and his sister's shame, something
rose within him that had it been given play might have made a man of
him, but, being crushed, died and rotted, and in the compost it made all
the evil of his nature flourished. The looks and gibes of his
fellow-employees at the barber-shop forced him to leave his work there.
Kit, bowed with shame and grief, dared not appear upon the streets,
where the girls who had envied her now hooted at her. So the little
family was shut in upon itself away from fellowship and sympathy.

Joe went seldom to see his father. He was not heartless; but the citadel
of his long desired and much vaunted manhood trembled before the sight
of his father's abject misery. The lines came round his lips, and lines
too must have come round his heart. Poor fellow, he was too young for
this forcing process, and in the hot-house of pain he only grew an
acrid, unripe cynic.

At the sitting of the Grand Jury Berry was indicted. His trial followed
soon, and the town turned out to see it. Some came to laugh and scoff,
but these, his enemies, were silenced by the spectacle of his grief. In
vain the lawyer whom he had secured showed that the evidence against him
proved nothing. In vain he produced proof of the slow accumulation of
what the man had. In vain he pleaded the man's former good name. The