Before he could speak, the girl rid herself of the question that had been ever present in her mind now for six months, and one which she had never failed to ask him every time she saw him or wrote to him.
"Have you heard anything of daddy?"
Thomas's smile disappeared. He left the little group of four in the middle of the space inside of the rails and sat down again at the table, annoyance in the slump with which he threw himself into his chair. "No, we haven't been able to locate him." He would have been sullen had he dared, but his game was too nearly played and he did not wish to foozle at the last, so he controlled his mood and forced a smile as he thought of a method of getting away from his client's importunity for awhile.
"It must be distasteful for you two women to remain in here any longer than possible," he said, rising from his chair again and pointing to a door at one side of the court-room. "Lennon," he called to the clerk, "my clients can wait in there, can't they?"
The clerk acquiescing, he and Hammond courteously escorted Mrs. Jones and Millie to the door and showed them into a small room which had been fitted up for hysterical women overcome with the proceeding in their cases, or for those who, like Mrs. Jones and Millie, wished to avoid the embarrassment of a long wait in the court-room.
As the two women went through the door, Thomas turned to Hammond and advised, in a low voice: "You better go, too, Hammond. Keep them cheered up."
With bad grace in his shrug and in his eyes, he followed Thomas's suggestion, first murmuring in his partner's ear: "I'll be damn glad when this day is over. All I've been doing this last week is to keep these darned women from backing out."
CHAPTER XV
By this time the court-room was filling up with its usual motley crowd of interested parties and spectators. There were the seekers after freedom, a heterogeneous collection of them, in all sorts and conditions of clothes, of all ages and of all kinds of faces and figures. There were the women from the millionaire colonies of the East, chic, sleek, and composed. They retired into a far corner with their attorneys, conferring in low tones, or else sitting, apparently unperturbed, while waiting for their cases to be called. There were always the adventuress types, chic, too, but made up with an eye to future conquest, their skirts always tighter or wider or shorter or longer than the style decreed, their hair a little more so-so, their lips redder, their cheeks rosier, and their faces whiter than their more conservative sisters of a narrower way. There were tired women from far states not allowing divorces for cruelty or desertion. They sat, in nondescript clothes, most of them, with eyes heavy-lidded, as if they were too weary to care much what happened to them. There were gay young creatures, dancers and small-time vaudeville actresses, who refused to take life seriously and who availed themselves of a dull season to make themselves free for another venture. There was a sprinkling of men, one of them a lumber magnate from an Eastern state, another a noted cabaret entertainer. They sat around, restlessly out of place, but at the same time taking an interest in those about them.