So the public was pleased with the verdict, was it? It little knew. She herself was filled with bitterness. The moment of the delivery of the verdict had been terrible to her.
She had not minded the hours of waiting. She had felt deadened, without special interest in what the jury decided. But this had changed the moment word came that the jury had reached a verdict. There was a terrible interval while the familiar roll of their names was called for the last time. Then she was told to stand up and face them, or rather to face the foreman, Josiah Howell, a bearded man with a lined brown face. He looked almost tremulously grave.
Lydia set her jaw, looking at him and thinking, "What business have you interfering in my fate?" But he was not the figure she was most aware of. It was the district attorney, whose excitement she knew was as great as her own.
"How say you?" said a voice. "Guilty or not guilty?"
"Guilty of manslaughter in the second degree," answered the foreman.
Lydia knew every eye in the court room was turned on her. She had heard of defendants who fainted on hearing an adverse verdict—keeled over like dead people. But one does not faint from anger, and anger was Lydia's emotion—anger that "that man" had actually obtained the verdict he wanted. Her breath came fast and her nostrils dilated. How sickening that she had nothing to do but stand there and let him triumph! No subsequent reversal would take away this moment from him.
The jury was thanked and dismissed. Wiley was busy putting in pleas that would enable her to remain at liberty during the appeal of her case. She stood alone, still now as a statue. She was thinking that some day the world should know by what methods that verdict had been obtained.
She had behaved well during her trial; had lived a life of retirement, seeing no one but Wiley and her immediate friends. But there was no further reason for playing a part. On the contrary she felt it would relieve her spirit to show the world—and O'Bannon—that she was not beaten yet. She did not intend to look upon herself as a criminal because he had induced a jury to convict her.
She bought herself some new clothes and went out every night, dancing till dawn and sleeping till noon. She began a new flirtation, this time with a good-looking insolent young English actor, Ludovic Blythe, hardly twenty-one, with a strange combination of wickedness and naïveté that some English boys possess. Her friends disapproved of him heartily.
At his suggestion she engaged a passage for England for early July. Wiley warned her that it was unlikely that the decision in her case would be handed down as soon as that, and if it were not she could not leave the country.