Miss Brady, standing quite still in one of her carefully cultivated, statuesque poses, watched her cousin cross the street and disappear into a narrow and shabbily painted doorway there. Then she took his advice, and producing a red morocco wrist bag from under the counter, shut the necklace into it with a vicious snap, as if she did not derive so much pleasure as before from handling it now.
Her cousin climbed the three flights of stairs to Judge Saxon's office. The stairs were dingy and looked unswept, and a pane of glass in the door of the untenanted suite across the landing from the Judge's was broken. Nothing about the Judge's quarters indicated that he was Colonel Everard's attorney, a big man in the town before the Everard régime, and under it—an unusual combination. His office was shabby outside and in. The lettering on the door, Saxon and Burr, Attorneys-at-Law, looked newer than it was by contrast, and it was still only six months old. Theodore Burr had his delayed junior partnership at last.
The Judge's young client did not pause to collect himself on the worn door-mat, as he had done when he first came here on errands like this. They were an old story to him now, and so were scenes like the one with Maggie, which he had just come through so creditably. He looked quite unruffled by it, calm as people are when they have no troubles to bear—or when they have borne all they can, and are about to find relief in establishing the fact. He knocked and stepped inside.
CHAPTER NINE
A fire in the air-tight stove in the corner had taken the early morning chill from the room and been permitted to burn out, now that the morning sun came in warm through the dusty windows, but the room was still close and cloudy with wood smoke. At a battered, roll-topped desk in the sunniest window Mr. Theodore Burr was struggling with the eccentricities of an ancient Remington, and looking superior to it and to all his surroundings, but the Judge was nowhere to be seen.
Mr. Burr was a very large, very pink young man, with blond hair which would have looked too good to be true on a woman, and near-set, green-blue eyes which managed to look vacant and aggressive at the same time. He was wearing a turquoise-blue tie which accentuated their effectiveness, and he occupied himself ostentatiously with the Remington for quite three minutes before he turned his most vacant and aggressive look upon his client.
"Well, Donovan?" he said.
Mr. Burr's manner was as patronizing as Mr. Ward's with the friendliness left out, but his client was not chilled by it.
"Theodore, where's the Judge?" he asked.