Lydia gave a funny little sound, half exclamation, half moan.
"O'Bannon!" she said.
No, Mrs. Galton thought that wasn't the name of the district attorney of Princess County. She rang her bell and told her secretary to look it up, while she went on calmly discussing the details of the procedure. Presently the secretary returned with a book. John J. Hillyer was district attorney.
"Are you sure?" Lydia asked. "I thought Mr. O'Bannon was."
The secretary said, consulting her book, that he had resigned almost two years before.
"But we'd have to have his signature, wouldn't we?" said Mrs. Galton.
She and the secretary talked of it, back and forth, not knowing that they were setting an impossible condition for Lydia. She couldn't ask O'Bannon. All her interest in the prospect of this new work had withered at the name. She felt a profound discouragement. It was terrible to find she would rather leave Evans in prison than ask O'Bannon to help get her out; terrible to find that man like a barrier across every path she tried to follow in order to escape from him. She thanked them for the trouble they had taken and rose to go. It was arranged that she was to come and begin work on the following Monday.
It was almost tea time when she reached home. Bobby was there, and the Piers, and presently May Swayne came in with her coal baron. Lydia's first emotion on seeing them was a warm, welcoming gladness, but she soon found to her surprise that she had very little to say to them.
The truth was that she had lost the trick of meeting her fellow beings in a purely social relation, and the conscious effort to adapt herself, her words, her attention to them exhausted her. She looked back with wonder to the old days, when she had done nothing else all day long.
Miss Bennett soon began to notice that she was looking like a little piece of carved ivory, with eyes of the blackest jet. When at last her visitors had all gone she went straight to bed.