Page:That Royle Girl (Balmer).pdf/239

 asleep; Fred was down there playing at the piano when the scrubbers were cleaning up. By spring, that boy could play—fine; in a couple of years he could play anything—the violin or cornet or saxophone. He was just a natural genius, my little boy. The whole city heard about him and just flocked to hear him play and to see him, too, tossing his head in time to his music and smiling so. . . ."

Tears blurred her eyes, but she maintained better control of herself than did some of the jurymen, who wiped their eyes again and again.

Calvin ceased to watch her; he stared intently at a bit of paper which he had picked up and which he tore slowly and with minute care into tiny bits.

"At this time," asked Elmen of his witness, "how was he toward you? Did his attitude toward you change?"

"I'd never have worked in years if Fred had his way. I worked because I'd be lost without it, that was all. No, that wasn't quite all either," the witness corrected. "I guess the truth of it was that I worked because I couldn't believe way inside of me that what'd come to Fred—to my boy, born the way I've told you—could be true, gentlemen." She faced for the first time toward the jury. "Somebody or something would take him from me, I knew; not for anything he ever would do, not because he ever would be bad, but because I was bad, gentlemen, to get him. It was the fear in my heart that my joy in my son couldn't be given to me."

Silence, except for sobbing, ensued in the court-room. Calvin had torn his bits of paper until his finger tips could grasp them no more; so he collected the fragments, carefully in his palm, while his mind seemed incapable of operating rationally.

"The State," he heard in Elmen's voice, "the State may cross-examine this witness." And Calvin's mind