“Sleep well?” inquired the reporter with amiable anxiety.
The red-headed girl turned on him eyes heavy with scorn. “Sleep?” she repeated acidly. “What’s that?”
Judge Carver looked as weary as Ben Potts sounded, and the indefatigable Mr. Farr looked blanched and bitten to the bone with something deeper than fatigue. Only Mr. Lambert looked haler and heartier than he had for several interminable days; and the faces of Stephen Bellamy and Susan Ives were as pale, as controlled, and as tranquil as ever.
Judge Carver let his gavel fall heavily. “The Court has given careful consideration as to the advisability of admitting the evidence in question last night, and has decided that it may be admitted. Mr. Lambert!” Mr. Lambert bounded joyfully forward. “Is the Court correct in understanding that Mr. Phipps is your witness?”
“Quite correct, Your Honour.”
“Let him be called.”
“Mr. Randolph Phipps!”
The principal of Eastern High School was a tall man; there was dignity in the way he held his head and moved his long, loose limbs, but all the dignity in the world could not still the nervous tremor of his hands or school the too sensitive mouth to rigidity. Under straight, heavy brows, the eyes of a dreamer startled from deep sleep looked out in amazement at a strange world; the sweep of dark hair above the wide brow came perilously close to being Byronic; only the height of his cheek bones and the width of his mouth saved him from suggesting a matinée idol of some previous era. He might have been thirty-five, or forty, or forty-five. His eyes were eighteen.
“Mr. Phipps, it is the understanding of this court that you have a communication to make of peculiar importance. You understand that in making that statement you will, of course, be subject to the usual course of direct and cross-examination?”
“I understand that—yes.”