Slowly, while the silence continued unbroken, the girl drew the slender chain around in front of her and unclasped it.
“I––I never––knew my parents,” she murmured musingly, looking down lovingly at the little locket. Then she opened it and sat gazing, rapt and absorbed, at the two little portraits within. “But there are their pictures,” she suddenly announced, holding the locket out to Cass.
It was said afterward that never in the history of legal procedure in New York had that court room held such dead silence as when Cass stood bending over the faces of the girl’s earthly parents, portrayed in the strange little locket which Rosendo had taken from Badillo years before. Never had it known such a tense moment; never had the very air itself seemed so filled with a mighty, unseen presence, as on that day and in that crisal hour.
Without speaking, Hood rose and looked over Cass’s shoulder at the locket. A muffled cry escaped him, and he turned and stared at Ames. The judge bent shaking over his desk.
“Mr. Hood!” he exclaimed. “Have you ever seen those pictures before?”
“Yes, sir,” replied Hood in a voice that was scarcely heard.
“Where, sir?”
Hood seemed to have frozen to the spot. His hands shook, and his words gibbered from his trembling lips.
“The––the woman’s portrait, sir––is––is––the one in––in Mr. Ames’s yacht!”