That conversation of a year ago had been hampered, Jack waiting on the start of his plane flight back to Boston; no leisure, bustling strangers, time pressure, uproar of loudspeakers and warming engines. Was it relevant now? Callista Blake a borderline paranoid? Rather urgently and emphatically, Judge Mann thought: _No, she's not._ Psychiatry more or less stood in the wings, in _People vs. Blake_. The State's man called her legally sane. If he hadn't, the State would have had no trouble shopping around for someone who did. Warner had had the girl examined by a Dr. Coburn, who might or might not testify; so far Warner had dropped no hint suggesting an insanity defense. Inaccessibility of mental action: that was relevant. Dominantly. For wasn't that the very essence of the principle of "reasonable doubt"? And was there any rational formula anywhere in the law, except the principle of reasonable doubt, at all likely to save Callista Blake? _Must see Jack again, soon._ He looked out on the city's darkness past a false curtain of window-glass reflection; a city of magic under a lens of illusion, as long ago in the creaky white-pillared house in Emmetville where he grew up he used to look out from the bedroom he shared with Jack, at images that would not live by day. Especially on rainy nights the vacant lot on the other side of Maple Street became for the boy transfigured, a garden of living shadows; sometimes, under the lash of wet wind, even the sea as Conrad and Melville had given the sea to him. In winter, leaves fallen, one could look past the few naked trees at the back of the lot, to a gleam of water a mile away, Walton Pond reflecting the motion and glitter of the railroad yard on its far side. Every night at 9:25, the ghostly passage of a fourteen-car express (to Terence and Jack, The Express)--one of the great trains that couldn't be imagined as stopping at Emmetville. You did not hear its thunder, only saw the silent gliding of windows; then thirty seconds after the vanishing came the desolate splendor of the whistle crying for a grade crossing, the night imperfect until that music had fulfilled its mission and died. _See him again; and bring out the inner voices._ The once vacant lot was now occupied in front by a filling station, in the rear by a drive-in theater; as a passion-pit, that probably served on a mass-production basis the same purpose once served by the vacant lot, where he and Jack occasionally discovered and snickered at the discarded rubber, stained handkerchiefs, and other detritus of hasty lechery. As for the gracious white house, where Terence had once known every spot, every squeaky board and dim hideaway in closets and under the eaves, it now belonged to someone who had made it a Tourist Home with noxious plastic animals on the front lawn, and called it Tumble Inn. So perish treasures of the spirit, to be born elsewhere in other guise, perhaps.