Those placidly folded hands of hers clutched at the poor mother-bosom in the fury of her grief; those placid-lidded eyes welled over with scalding tears; that calmly set mouth was convulsed like a wailing child's, and all the rigorous lines of her whole body were relaxed into overborne curves of agony.

"Oh, my son, my son, my son!" lamented Elvira Gordon.

"Have mercy, have mercy, O Father in heaven! Let him be proved innocent! Let Lot Gordon live! Oh, my son!" Elvira Gordon had the stern pride of justice of a Brutus.

She would not without proof discover even to the passionate pleading of her own heart that she believed her son innocent, but believe it she did.
Every breath she drew was a prayer that Lot Gordon might yet speak and clear Burr.

This morning she had some slight hope that that might come to pass, for the sick man had passed a comfortable night except for his old enemy, the cough.
"It's my belief," Margaret Bean had told Elvira, when she had sped across the road in the early morning to inquire, "that it's his old trouble that's going to kill him when he does die instead of anything else." "Has he spoken yet ?" asked Elvira, eagerly.
"No, he ain't; but there's none so still as them that won't speak." Margaret Bean nodded shrewdly at Elvira.