“Just a moment, Mr. Lambert,” interrupted Judge Carver. “Is your cross-examination going to take some time?”
“Quite a time, I believe, Your Honour.”
“Then I think it best that we adjourn for the noon recess, as it is already after twelve. The Court stands adjourned until one-ten.”
“Well, here’s where we get our comic relief,” said the reporter with unction. “That son of sunny Italy is going to give us an enviable imitation of a three-ringed circus and a bag of monkeys before he and Lambert get through with each other, or I miss my guess. He’s got a look in his eye that is worth the price of admission alone. What’s your mature opinion of him?”
“I think that he’s beguiling,” said the red-headed girl somewhat listlessly. Little shadows were under her gray eyes, and she curled small limp paws about a neglected notebook. Something in the drooping shoulders under the efficient jacket suggested an exhausted baby in need of a crib and a bottle of hot milk and a firm and friendly tucking in. She made a half-hearted effort to overtake an enormous yawn that was about to engulf her, and then surrendered plaintively.
“Bored?” inquired the real reporter, his countenance illuminated by an expression of agreeable surprise.
“Bored?” cried the lady beside him in a voice at once scornful and outraged. “Bored? I’m half destroyed with excitement. I can’t sleep any more. I go back to the boarding house every night and sit up in front of a gas stove with an orange-and-magenta comforter over my shoulders that ought to warm the dead, writing up my notes until all hours; and then I put a purple comforter over my knees and a muffler over my nose, and get an apple and sit there alternately gnawing the apple and my fingers and trying to work out who did it until even the cats stop singing under my window and the sky begins to get that nice, appealing slate colour that’s so prettily referred to as dawn. And even then I don’t know who did it.”
“Don’t you, indeed?” inquired the reporter severely, looking irritated and anxious. “Haven’t you any sense at all, you little idiot? Listen, I know a place just two blocks down where you can get some fairly decent hot soup. You go and drink about a quart of it and then trot along home and turn in, and I’ll do your notes for you to-night so well that your boss will double your salary in the morning—and if you’re very good and sleep eighteen hours, I may tell you who did the murder.”
The red-headed girl, who had shuddered fastidiously at the offer of fairly decent soup, eyed him ungratefully as she extracted a packet of salted peanuts from the capacious pouch that served her as handbag, commissary, and dressing table.