ame the general uprising which
meant the court dismissed, that it was noon.

Father, looking down at me, said, "Now what do you propose to do? Are
you going home with me?"

"Please," I said, "do this one thing for me. I have done everything
you have wished so far. I can not endure not to know the worst or the
best that can happen. I must hear the end. Let us come back here
again this afternoon."

I was so excited that I didn't care what father thought of me. But all
he said was, "Well!" And, "Then we will go over to the restaurant
across the street for luncheon instead of going home."

It was a help not to have to step out of the excitement of the
proceedings. It was that which kept me up, which carried me along.
"There she is; that's the girl who saw it!" The voices whispering
behind me gave me a sad stir of feeling, but it was better than being
left to think. It spurred me; and the clatter of dishes and the crowd
which filled the restaurant, talking all at once, yet with no distinct
words audible, all helped to bridge over the chasm of the waiting. I
could see Laura Burnet sitting at a near table with her thick veil
raised only a little above her nose, just enough to let her drink a cup
of tea. Some of father's friends and one or two of the young men I
knew stopped at our table to shake hands, but very little was said, and
of the trial nothing at all. For all their trying to be easy and
natural, I could see that my presence embarrassed them. I could see
them glancing at me as if they wondered what sort of person I could
be--as though I had become something different from a girl by answering
questions in the witness-box. By two o'clock we were back in court
again; and how changed everything seemed! All that desultory feeling
of the morning was gone, and as I looked about over the faces I could
see how every one's mind was fixed on the same thing. A woman whom I
did not know, jostling at my shoulder as I went in, confided to me that
what she wanted was, "To hear Dingley tear the defense to pieces." I
wondered if the only people in the room who didn't want to hear that
were myself and the Spanish Woman.

But it was Mr. Jackson who got up first. Though I had heard all the
evidence that morning it had come out in such little bits and patches
with such disagreements of lawyers between, and I had myself been so in
the midst of it that I had no idea as to how it would sum up; and I had
been waiting an