"He has made friends with her--a woman who has stood in the dock on a capital charge." "And has been acquitted," Dick Hazlewood added quietly and Mrs.Pettifer blazed up.
"She wouldn't have been acquitted if I had been on the jury.

A parcel of silly men who are taken in by a pretty face!" she cried, and Dick broke in: "Aunt Margaret, I am sorry to interrupt you.

But I want you to understand that I am with my father heart and soul in this." He spoke very slowly and deliberately and Mrs.Pettifer was utterly dismayed.
"You!" she cried.

She grew pale, and alarm so changed her face it was as if a tragic mask had been slipped over it.

"Oh, Dick, not you!" "Yes, I.I think it is cruelly hard," he continued with his eyes relentlessly fixed upon Mrs.Pettifer's face, "that a woman like Mrs.
Ballantyne, who has endured all the horrors of a trial, the publicity, the suspense, the dread risk that justice might miscarry, should have afterwards to suffer the treatment of a leper." There was for the moment no room for any anger now in Mrs.Pettifer's thoughts.