Page:That Royle Girl (Balmer).pdf/267

 "You are able to go on?" he asked her, kindly.

"Perfectly able," replied Joan Daisy.

"The State is prepared to proceed?" inquired the judge, as a matter of formality.

Calvin stood quietly, betraying by nothing else than his paleness the longing within him to escape his next duty.

"Thoroughly," he replied to the judge; and thoroughly, as he was prepared, he proceeded with his attack upon the character of the witness.

He left the Criminal Court building with no doubt that he had done right, although his own questions, together with the answers which he had forced from her, haunted his mind miserably. He had not succeeded in obtaining from her admission of the act of wrong-doing with Ketlar; but no one, he felt, could longer be at a loss as to what had been the relations between Ketlar and her.

He had eluded Ellison, after having talked over matters for a few minutes in the state's attorney's offices, and he was on the street alone where the keen cold of the early January evening stimulated him, physically, but left him emotionally fagged. He kept running over the questions which he had cast at the girl in the witness chair who had replied to him, squarely, her blue eyes even to his; he ran over her answers, not merely in his mind, but upon his lips, to reproduce her inflection as she had refuted and denied his implications.

He felt sure that he had demonstrated, even to the most stupid juror, how she lied and how utterly untrustworthy she was, and the conclusion that she was also immoral seemed to him inevitable; yet some of her replies clung in Calvin's own mind and confused him, as they had not in court, and there stood before him a troubling image of her, as she had faced him throughout the day in court, with her head up, her brow very white, her eyes very blue