“the extreme penalty” for murder, the Tocsin had declared, with great originality:  “This is just the kind of thing that causes mobs and justifies them.  If we are to continue to permit the worst class of malefactors to escape the consequences of their crimes through the unwholesome dexterities and the shifty manipulations and technicalities of a certain criminal lawyer, the time will come when an outraged citizenry may take the enforcement of the law in its own hands.  Let us call a spade a spade.  If Canaan’s streets ever echo with the tread of a mob, the fault lies upon the head of Joseph Louden, who has once more brought about a miscarriage of justice. . . .”

Joe did not move into a larger office; he remained in the little room with its one window and its fine view of the jail; his clients were nearly all poor, and many of his fees quite literally nominal.  Tatters and rags came up the narrow stairway to his door —­tatters and rags and pitiful fineries:  the bleared, the sodden, the flaunting and rouged, the furtive and wary, some in rags, some in tags, and some—­ the sorriest—­in velvet gowns.  With these, the distressed, the wrong-doers, the drunken, the dirty, and the very poor, his work lay and his days and nights were spent.

Ariel had told Roger Tabor that in time Joe might come to be what the town thought him, if it gave him no other chance.  Only its dinginess and evil surrounded him; no respectable house was open to him; the barrooms—­except that of the “National House”—­welcomed him gratefully and admiringly.  Once he went to church, on a pleasant morning when nice girls wear pretty spring dresses; it gave him a thrill of delight to see them, to be near clean, good people once more.  Inadvertently, he took a seat by his step-mother, who rose with a slight rustle of silk and moved to another pew; and it happened, additionally, that this was the morning that the minister, fired by the Tocsin’s warnings, had chosen to preach on the subject of Joe himself.

The outcast returned to his own kind.  No lady spoke to him upon the street.  Mamie Pike had passed him with averted eyes since her first meeting with him, but the shunning and snubbing of a young man by a pretty girl have never yet, if done in a certain way, prevented him from continuing to be in love with her.  Mamie did it in the certain way.  Joe did not wince, therefore it hurt all the more, for blows from which one cringes lose much of their force.

The town dog had been given a bad name, painted solid black from head to heel.  He was a storm centre of scandal; the entrance to his dingy stairway was in square view of the “National House,” and the result is imaginable.  How many of Joe’s clients, especially those sorriest of the velvet gowns, were conjectured to ascend his stairs for reasons more convivial than legal!  Yes, he lived with his own kind, and, so far as the rest of Canaan was concerned, might as well have worn the scarlet letter on his breast or branded on his forehead.