Page:That Royle Girl (Balmer).pdf/336

 did it; so I'll think of it. I'd have to, anyway." She put down the cup and with a forefinger tapped the edge of the sink and then tapped at a point a foot away and twelve inches off, again. "They put bullets into us like that, Dads," she explained. "Into the bottom of the car, I mean; but they meant 'em for us—Neski and Mr. Clarke and me. Baretta did it, we know; but even after he's dead we can't get any one to say so. They'll only talk about Adele now. . . . It gives you an idea of what the State is up against. . . . I don't mind so much the way Mr. Clarke went after me on the stand."

Again, in her intentness, she had omitted to speak the connective idea; and this time Dads did not ask what it was. He arranged to accompany her to court in the morning and, with more than the usual tenderness, he kissed her good night and retired to the bedroom where his wife offered discussion of the comparative marital and financial merits of Mr. Hoberg, who certainly was a substantial man, and Fred, who was to be freed to-morrow under conditions which any one would call creditable to him, so that no one could say his reputation had been hurt.

Dads attended to this so perfunctorily that, for the first time, mamma complained to him of lack of interest in Daisy's welfare.

Joan took to bed the newspaper which Dads had brought home; and after switching off her reading lamp, she reached up for the light again, several times. Upon the front page was heralded a forecast of Ket's release; but it was not this which drew her again and again to the page. It was the account of her own and Mr. Clarke's expeditions to Tut's Temple, of their pursuit after leaving the Temple and of the fight in the ditch of the corn field and of the discovery, in the city, of Baretta dead.

She skipped to a paragraph narrating the arrest of