Page:That Royle Girl (Balmer).pdf/246

 Elmen had forced into the jury when Calvin had spent the State's challenges, and who had become foreman.

"Now," said Max Elmen, "you may tell us of your first meeting with the defendant in this case." And Calvin forgot the jury to himself gaze at the girl in the glare of the spotlights.

Glare supplied to Joan Daisy her sole physical sensation. First it was the glare of the noonday sun upon the snow, which shone into her eyes as she sat facing the windows; now the glare from the reflector-boxes became more blinding, but she succeeded in not squinting.

Max Elmen recently had concentrated his several injunctions into one great commandment: "Make them like you every minute." Whatever else she might do, this she must remember, and if she merely obeyed it she could not go far wrong. "You go upon the stand," explained Max, "to establish an alibi; the alibi is good only if they believe you; they will believe you if they like you. So that is all you have to do, but you must do it, make them like you every minute."

So when the glare blinded her, she knew she must not squint; for no one could like a girl with a squint.

An effect of the lights was to shut off sight of Max Elmen and his son Herman, of Ket and his mother and also of Assistant State's Attorney Calvin Clarke and that Mr. Ellison who sat beside him. It created the illusion of strangely removing her into a far recess of the courtroom into which Max Elmen's voice penetrated, borne upon the glare.

"Tell us of your first meeting with the defendant," said the loud but distant words; and, off by herself, Joan Daisy recollected how she had encountered Ket when she was twelve years old.

She fixed the event in her memory as having occurred a few months before Dads made his denial of paternity