The afternoon session was also enlivened by the testimony of several of the ladies who had been members of the bridge party on the day of Mr. Balfame's unseemly conduct at the Club. They testified that although Mrs. Balfame naturally dissolved upon her return to the card-room, there had been nothing whatever in her demeanour to suggest seething passion. Mrs. Battle, who was an imposing figure in the witness chair, her greater bulk being above the waist, tossed her head and asseverated with refined emphasis that Mrs. Balfame was one of those rare and exquisite beings that are temperamentally incapable of passion of any sort. Her immediate return to her home was prompted more by delicacy than even by pain. Miss Crumley's pencil faltered as she listened. She could not give a jeering public even a faithful outline of a woman as devoted to the sacred cause of friendship and Elsinore as Mrs. Battle. The testimony of none of these ladies was more emphatic than that of Mrs. Bascom, wife of the supplanted justice, and she added unexpectedly that she had been so upset herself that she too had left the clubhouse immediately, and, her swift car passing Dr. Anna Steuer's little runabout, she had seen Mrs. Balfame chatting pleasantly and without a trace of recent emotion. Mrs. Balfame almost relaxed the set curves of her mouth at this surprising statement. She recalled that a car had passed and that she had wondered at the time if any one had noticed her extreme agitation. She kept her muscles in order, but unconsciously her eyes followed Mrs. Bascom, as she left the witness-chair, with an expression of puzzled gratitude. The District Attorney turned to the reporters with a short sardonic laugh, and Mr. Broderick shook his head as he murmured to Mr. Wagstaff: "Can you beat that? And yet they say women don't stand by one another." "Good for the whole game, I guess," replied the young _Flag_ star, who was enamoured of a very pretty suffragette. The Judge rose, and the afternoon session was over. The great case of The People vs. Mrs. Balfame rested until the following morning. CHAPTER XXX Mrs. Balfame walked back through the now familiar tunnel more hopeful and elated than any one in the courtroom would have inferred from her chiselled manner. "I almost feel that I have the courage to look at the sketches of myself in the papers," she said lightly to Rush, who escorted her. "I haven't dared open a paper since Monday morning." "Better not." Rush also was in high spirits. "Keep your mental mercury as high as possible. It doesn't matter, anyhow. You'll be clear in less than a week. The impression all those splendid friends of yours created knocked the prosecution silly." "I have not once glanced at the jury," said Mrs. Balfame proudly, "and I never shall. All I was conscious of was that they were chewing gum, and that the man above me snorts constantly."