Page:That Royle Girl (Balmer).pdf/261

 "Perhaps ten minutes. Then he went downstairs and I heard him in his room."

"What did you do?"

"I went to bed in my room," Joan Daisy related, grasping again the solid support of truth. "I went to bed and to sleep," she faced the jury, "for I had no idea then that Adele Ketlar was dead, much less did I have any part in it at all. I went to sleep, I tell you, thinking of Ket's music and the music of the Chicago Orchestra and my dream—oh, I've told you that. Well, I had it that night, for I'd no idea that anything was wrong until policemen in the halls waked me up, and they arrested Ket, and I went down to see what was the matter, and they told me that Adele was shot and that Ket had done it; and they went for me and asked me questions when I could hardly think and didn't know what they were saying or I was saying, but they made me answer, and Mr. Clarke came and . . ."

Calvin arose to his feet and the witness stared at him.

Max Elmen advanced in protective posture as though to ward from his witness a physical attack; he swung, confronting Calvin and glaring at him under drawn brows; suddenly, with an abrupt shrug, he visibly altered his impulse and yielded.

"Take the witness," he bade.

Calvin placed himself, deliberately, for the cross-examination, standing almost directly in front of the witness and beside his table upon which his notes lay close at hand. When he looked at her, the witness' eyes gazed directly into his eyes, and when he glanced down at his table, he felt that the witness followed the fumbling of his hands amid his memoranda.

He had no need of his notes; every answer this witness had uttered seemed perfectly recorded in his brain which classified the evidence for him in orderly sequence. His