"Give the man a chance. It is our wish to see justice vindicated
and the guilty punished; but not before the jury has pronounced
its verdict."
"The Star was his only friend," sighed Deborah Scoville, as she
laid this clipping aside and took up another headed by a picture
of her husband. This picture she subjected to the same scrutiny
she had just given to her own reflection in the glass: "Seeing him
anew," as she said to herself, "after all these years of
determined forgetfulness."
It was not an unhandsome face. Indeed, it was his good looks which
had prevailed over her judgment in the early days of their
courtship. Reuther had inherited her harmony of feature from him,-
-the chiselled nose, the well-modelled chin, and all the other
physical graces which had made him a fine figure behind his bar.
But even with the softening of her feelings towards him since she
had thus set herself up in his defence, Deborah could not fail to
perceive under all these surface attractions an expression of
unreliability, or, as some would say, of actual cruelty. Ruddy-
haired and fair of skin, he should have had an optimistic
temperament; but, on the contrary, he was of a gloomy nature, and
only infrequently social. No company was better for his being in
it. Never had she seen any man sit out the evening with him
without effort. Yet the house had prospered. How often had she
said to herself, in noting these facts: "Yet the house prospers!"
There was always money in the till even when the patronage was
small.
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