On entering the room, everybody and everything were found just as they had been the day before—­a day that seemed to Marcus a month ago.  The jury were idling over the newspapers, or lazily turning their quids.  The coroner, who looked a little the worse for his dinner of the day before, was bandying jokes with the facetious reporters.  The other reporters were sharpening their pencils and laying out their note books.  Some—­the younger ones—­were listening with a species of reverence, which they would soon outgrow, to the official jesting of the coroner.  Others were squabbling over the right and title to certain chairs which possessed the extraordinary advantage of being a foot or two nearer the coroner than the other chairs.  This is a grave cause of dispute among the reporters, and has been known to give rise to a great many hard words, and threats of subsequent chastisements, which are always indefinitely postponed.

The coroner nodded, and said “good morning” to the comers, and assumed a temporary official dignity, by taking down his right leg from the arm of the chair over which it gracefully depended.  He also fortified himself, by thrusting a sizable chew into a corner of his mouth, as if he were carefully loading a pistol.

But neither the coroner, nor the jury, nor the reporters, nor the few private citizens who had obtained entrance by special dispensation, and sat gaping about the room, attracted the attention of the prisoner.  Before him was one in whose presence all other persons faded into nothingness—­the fair disturber of his peaceful life—­the arbitress of his fate—­Patty Minford.

CHAPTER VII.

PET AS A WITNESS.

Little Pet sat on the low stool which she had always occupied, and which Marcus, in his strange sentimentality, had always considered sacred to her.  She was veiled; but, through the thick gauze, he could see that her beautiful face was deathly pale.  Her slender frame shook with little convulsions, that made the chair rattle.

“Be calm, my dear child,” said a stout, self-possessed woman who sat by her side, and held a bottle of salts conspicuously in her hand.  “Remember, you have only to tell the trewth, and let the consekences fall where they may.  Tell the trewth, as the old sayin’ is, and shame the de—­you know who.”

Mrs. Crull—­for she it was—­checked herself with a neat cough.  Her three months’ private education seemed to have been lost upon her.  She could never speak correctly out of Miss Pillbody’s sight.  Fortunately, her heart needed no education.  She had taken the poor orphan girl to her home, and been a mother to her.  In that phrase there is an horizonless world of love.

The deep, manly voice of Mrs. Crull carried assurance to the sinking heart of Patty.  She took the extended hand, and pressed it, deriving strength from the contact of that strong, positive nature.