to do when a squirming youngster. With his arms still affectionately about the shoulders of the two, Hampstead walked on down the street, palm-studded, with flower-bordered skirts of green on either side and the blue vista of the Bay showing dimly in the growing dusk.
Rose was waiting on the piazza. Her face was very calm, yet to John's keen eye, it bore a look of desperately mustered self-control. With the ready intuition of her sex, she had divined far more completely than her brother how desperate and dangerous was the struggle upon which he was entering, and she was determined to give him every advantage that sympathy, poise, and unwavering loyalty could supply.
"It's all right, Rose, all right," he hastened to assure her, as the steps were mounted. "A mere extravagance of an excited woman that the papers have made into a great sensation. It will melt away like fog. We are helpless for a few days until I can demand and receive a hearing upon preliminary trial. That will show that they have no case at all. Until then, we must simply stand and be strong."
Rose was already in her brother's arms, yet his speech, instead of reassuring her, made the tears flow.
"It is so—so humiliating to think of you defending yourself," she protested, "to hear you talk of their inability to make out a case. It seems so—so lowering, as if you were going to be put on trial just like a criminal."
"Why," replied John, "that's just what it all means. Just like a criminal!"
He said the thing strongly enough, but after it came a choke in the throat. He had not really comprehended this before. He had thought of making his defense from the standpoint of the popular idol that he was. As a matter of fact, he was going to trial like any criminal.
