"When did he tell you all that?" the judge asked, his nostrils quivering with rage, his voice strained to a tenor.
"Just now." Margaret grew happily voluble and she nodded her head back and forth like a child of six as she ogled the judge. "When I came into court he was here and I told him the trouble I was in. It's the only time I've seen him since you asked me not to."
Townsend was so relieved that he did not hear the last of her remark and the noisy delight of the spectators also escaped him. He was bent upon one purpose, that of chastising Thomas. "Why didn't you tell me this before?" he asked Margaret, in tender tones, forgetting, in his ardor, that there was such a thing as a court-room. He leaned far over the desk and beamed upon her. "There, there, don't let it upset you." He offered her a glass of water.
As she took it, Thomas stepped up to the bench again and tried to palliate the judge's wounded sensibilities. "If your Honor please, I was simply acting from a friendly standpoint and I thought—"
"No matter what your motives were, sir, you presumed when you told the plaintiff what the court's rulings would be." He turned abruptly from Thomas and leaned graciously toward the plaintiff. "Now, Mrs. Davis," he resumed, "let me question you. Why did you leave your husband in Chicago?"
Reassured, Margaret bridled coyly and answered, lifting her lids to the judge: "Because he didn't show up for a performance and I had to go on alone—and afterward the manager told him the act was better without him. And he sulked and stayed away from the theater all the rest of the week and on our next jump he refused to go with me." Her last words dwindled into a plaintive whine.
"And you were obliged to go without him?" Lem Townsend subtly gave a slight nod of his head which Margaret caught and interpreted into a vigorous acquiescence with her own curly blond head.
"Did you try to have him go with you?" Again the hint and again Margaret scored her point.
"Of course I did!" she responded. "I mean, yes—your Honor. But he said he'd show me how long I could go it on my own; but I showed him, for I've never seen him since. I only heard from him once and that was when I sent him money."
"Have you tried to see him?" Lem Townsend asked the last question grudgingly, but he felt that his own honor in the case was in danger of impeachment, and he was sure that his slight nod would be followed as it had before. He was right.