"I believe you to be the biggest rascal in town," he shouted. "Get
out, or I won't answer for myself. Ladies are not to be treated in
this manner."
Did he remember his own rough handling of the sex on the witness
stand?
"_I_ didn't ask to see the ladies," protested Flannagan, turning
with a slinking gait towards the door.
If they only had let him go! If the judge in his new self-
confidence had not been so anxious to deepen the effect and make
any future repetition of the situation impossible!
"You understand the lady," he interposed, with the quiet dignity
which was so imposing on the bench. "She has no sympathy with your
ideas and no faith in your conclusions. She believes absolutely in
my son's innocence."
"Do you, ma'am?" The man had turned and was surveying her with the
dogged impudence of his class. "I'd like to hear you say it, if
you don't mind, ma'am. Perhaps, then, I'll believe it."
"I--" she began, trembling so, that she failed to reach her feet,
although she made one spasmodic effort to do so. "I believe--Oh, I
feel ill! It's been too much--I--" her head fell forward and she
turned herself quite away from them all.
"You see she ain't so eager, jedge, as you thought," laughed the
bill-poster, with a clumsy bow he evidently meant to be sarcastic.
"Oh, what have I done!" moaned Deborah, starting up as though she
would fling herself after the retreating figure, now half way down
the hall.
She saw in the look of the judge as he forcibly stopped her, and
heard in the lawyer's whisper as he bounded past them both to see
the fellow out: "Useless; nothing will bridle him now"; and
finding no support for her despairing spirit either on earth or,
as she thought, in heaven, she collapsed where she sat and fell
unnoticed to the floor, where she lay prone at the feet of the
equally unconscious figure of the judge, fixed in another attack
of his peculiar complaint.
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