And the vultures of scandal are
tearing at his heart. And he will never be able to prove his
innocence!"
He stayed in his rooms all that day. Rowan, in answer to his
summons, had said that he should come about the middle of the
afternoon; and it was near the middle of the afternoon now. As he
counted the minutes, Judge Morris was unable to shut out from his
mind the gloomier possibilities of the case.
"There is some truth behind all this," he said. "She broke her
engagement with him,--at least, she severed all relations with him;
and she would not do that without grave reason." He was compelled
to believe that she must have learned from Rowan himself the things
that had compelled her painful course. Why had Rowan never
confided these things to him? His mind, while remaining the mind
of a friend, almost the mind of a father toward a son, became also
the mind of a lawyer, a criminal lawyer, with the old, fixed, human
bloodhound passion for the scent of crime and the footsteps of
guilt.
It was with both attitudes that he himself answered Rowan's ring;
he opened the door half warmly and half coldly. In former years
when working up his great cases involving life and death, it had
been an occasional custom of his to receive his clients, if they
were socially his friends, not in his private office, but in his
rooms; it was part of his nature to show them at such crises his
unshaken trust in their characters. He received Rowan in his rooms
now.
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