And it was:
"Guilty!"
When I woke to a full realisation of what this entailed (for I
must have lost consciousness for a minute, though no one seemed to
notice), the one fact staring me in the face--staring as a live
thing stares--was that it would devolve upon me to pronounce his
sentence; upon me, Archibald Ostrander, an automaton no longer,
but a man realising to the full his part in this miscarriage of
justice.
Somehow, strange as it may appear, I had thought little of this
possibility previous to this moment. I found myself upon the brink
of this new gulf before the dizziness of my escape from the other
had fully passed. Do you wonder that I recoiled, sought to gain
time, put off delivering the sentence from day to day? I had
sinned,--sinned irredeemably--but there are depths of infamy
beyond which a man cannot go. I had reached that point. Chaos
confronted me, and in contemplation of it, I fell ill.
What saved me? A new discovery, and the loving sympathy of my son
Oliver. One night--a momentous one to me--he came to my room and,
closing the door behind him, stood with his back to it,
contemplating me in a way that startled me.
What had happened? What lay behind this new and penetrating look,
this anxious and yet persistent manner? I dared not think. I dared
not yield to the terror which must follow thought. Terror blanches
the cheek and my cheek must never blanch under anybody's scrutiny.
Never, never, so long as I lived.
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