FROM THE LIFE
Plummer, was nowhere to be seen. The whole thing had evidently been a ridiculous false alarm, and Arnett felt suddenly very foolish.
The judge had not yet entered from his chambers. There were only three jurors in the jury-box—for the others were still to be chosen from the panel. A buzz of low-voiced conversation hung over the groups of lawyers, court officers, and privileged spectators within the rail; and those in the public seats coughed and scuffled their feet, uneasily expectant. In the light of high windows the room was shabbily ugly, with walls painted a sort of greasy robin's-egg blue and its cheap furnishings worn by the contact of innumerable bodies—as repellent as a prison, as sordid as the tragedies that had soiled it, as if the beautiful ideals of justice had left it to be a place only for the craftiness of statutory law.
Arnett sat down in a back seat, intimidated by the crowd of strangers, shy of his intrusion upon the business of the court, and vaguely depressed by the commonplace and sordid aspect of the reality before him. He was an idealist in art.
He sat watching Wickson. The detective, Collins, was also watching Wickson, but with a very different sort of eye.
The District Attorney was consulting with an assistant over a jury-list of typewritten names, each name of which was followed by a few brief notes that represented Collins's work of investiga-
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