T CHANGELING I NO outward appearance the whole of the courtroom scene was drab, ordinary. There was the stuffy rectangle of a room, half dark in the January dusk, for all that the electric lights glowed with meager incandescence. There was the judge, in his robe, at the desk of the court. There were the jurymen, solemn as in church. There the court stenographers, bald, active as ants. There the men of the daily jourhals, more aloof, more judicial than the judge. There the press of morbid spectators, leaning forward like runners on the mark. There the policemen, court attendants, whatnot, relaxed of body, concentrated of eye, jealous of the dignity of the court as a house-dog of its master's home. Through the windows of the court could be seen the bulk of the Tombs, heavy, hopeless, horrible as the things whence it takes its chilly name. The case of the people versus Anna Janssen for the murder of Alastair de Vries droned on. The district attorney, youngish, slim, lithe, a little 3 sinister the impression of a hunting-dog all over him was examining a witness, a rat-faced man who had something of the old-time bartender or private detective about him. "It was your business, as attendant at the Oriental Garden, to see that order was kept?" "Yes, sir." "There was no semblance of disorder at all until you heard the shot fired?" "No, sir." "Mr. De Vries was at a table with a party?" "Yes, sir." "You heard the shot and you saw Mr. De Vries fall forward?" "Yes, sir. Crumpled up, sort of." "Then you ran to him?" "Yes, sir." "You saw the woman Janssen back of the hall with a revolver?" "Yes, sir." "What was she doing?" "She was laughing." "Was she drunk?" "The laugh sounded drunk." "Was she very much under the influence of liquor ?" "She could n't have been, else she would n't have got away.' "You are certain that it was the prisoner?" All eyes in the court-room were turned to the prisoner in the dock. And there was in the sordid trial chamber a sense of great disturbance in the air, though, from the minds and personalities of all gathered there, there rose in gray tendrils a haze of doubt, of disbelief, of mystery. She sat in the dock, in the sordid court-room, among the unseemly officers and the public, as a statue in some public square might stand above the rabble. Mature, magnificent, the prisoner seemed almost like some goddess from a Norse mythology. First, her strange coloring made all catch their breath. Her face was tanned to an absolutely golden hue, and out of this work of delicate bronze there looked, calm and confident, two eyes that were blue as sea-water. Her eyebrows, her hair, were bleached by the sun until her eyebrows were two half-moons of silver, until her hair was the pale, beautiful gold of honey in dark lights and like vivid strands of live silver when the light fell on it. She had the strange, exotic appearance of the women of Saba Isle, the ancient colony of Holland sailors and Carib Indian belles, a small dot in the West Indies where there is a town on the top of a mountain, and life is as in the garden of the Hesperides. It was not alone her coloring, her splendid face. From her there came such an aura of health, of spiritual strength, it seemed impossible that this woman was the chorus girl Janssen who had been |