Lydia shrugged her shoulders.
"I don't care much what happens to me," she said.
Eleanor hesitated. She saw suddenly that what she was about to say was the principal object of her visit.
"Lydia, I hope that you will come out all right, but you don't know Dan O'Bannon as I do, and——"
"You think he will want to convict me?"
"Not you personally, of course. But he believes in the law. He wants to believe in its honesty and equality. He suffered last month, I know, in convicting a delivery-wagon driver, and his offense wasn't half as flagrant as yours. Oh, Lydia, have some imagination! Don't you see that his own honor and democracy will make him feel it more his duty to convict you than all the less conspicuous criminals put together?"
A strange change had taken place in Lydia during this speech. At the beginning of it she had been shrunk into a corner of a deep chair; but as Eleanor spoke life seemed to be breathed into her, until she sat erect, grew tense, and finally rose to her feet.
"You mean there would be publicity, political advantage, in sending a person in my position to prison?"
"Don't be perverse, Lydia. I mean that, more than most men, he will see his duty is to treat you as he would any criminal. You make it difficult for me to tell you something that I must tell you. Mr. O'Bannon feels, I'm afraid, a certain amount of antagonism toward you."
A staring, insolent silence was Lydia's answer.