Again, overcome by the complications of the situation in which she found herself, she was unable to answer except with a reluctant nod.
"Did you ever see Mrs. Jones's husband drunk?"
As Thomas asked this question he looked toward Bill. Millie did not answer. The tears gathered in her eyes and she wiped them away, burying her face in the handkerchief she held in one of her hands.
Thomas insisted. "You have seen him in that condition hundreds of times, have you not?"
There was a malicious note in his voice this time, as well as in the look he directed at the old man at the table.
Millie caught it, and a slight antagonism crept into her voice as she straightened in her chair, answering, in surprise, "Why, I never counted."
Thomas was deriving a long-desired satisfaction in his prodding of Bill, and it threatened his shrewder self-control. "But he was in the habit of coming home drunk, wasn't he?" There was real glee in the question, but it escaped Millie this time. With a beseeching glance at Thomas, and one which pleaded for forgiveness toward Bill, she said, slowly, "Sometimes."
"And because of the poverty brought about by those bad habits you were obliged to leave—"
Here Millie broke in. Forgetting her embarrassment and the crowded court-room in the realization that words were being put into her mouth, words which fell far short of the truth, she burst out, indignantly: "Why, I never said any such thing! I went away to work because there was no opportunity in Calivada to earn any money, and I thought as long as I was going at all I might just as well go to San Francisco where I could make a salary large enough to take care of myself and to help Mr. and Mrs. Jones, who have been very good to me."
Thomas saw that he had overstepped himself and he groped in his mind for new questions, until a scowl from Hammond reminded him that it might be better to stop rather than to bring out evidence which might turn against them and in favor of Bill. So he dismissed Millie from the stand.