Hallie E Rives

The Long Lane's Turning: (Hallie E. Rives Classics Collection) Hallie E Rives

Publisher Marketing: The dark was falling over the court-room. A lurid ray of the setting sun gleamed redly on the dust-streaked window panes, and struggled disconsolately with the melancholy gleam of the oil lamps that an awkward attendant with creaking foot-leather had laboriously lighted in their wall-brackets. Their pale radiance gleamed on the painted faces of dead jurists that looked down from fly-specked canvases on the walls and was reflected from the mass of moving, living faces that filled the room, whose eyes gazed alternately at the Judge's vacant seat, and at the empty railed space that had penned in the restless jury now considering their verdict in an upper room-to return again and again to the spot where sat the man over whose dingy case a medley of voices had declaimed and wrangled throughout that southern spring day. He sat slouched in his chair, his narrow, faded-blue eyes, strained and frightened, fixed on the empty jury-box, his uncertain hand lifting from time to time to give a swift, furtive touch to his collar or a thrust to his wiry, sand-coloured hair. In the pallid lamp-light the hard sneer that had curved his lips during the dragging trial had faded and his face seemed all at once piteous and younger.