The coroner held Lydia for the grand jury in ten thousand dollars' bail. This had been considered a foregone conclusion and did not particularly distress or alarm Eleanor. What did alarm her was her inability to get in touch with O'Bannon. In all the months of their quick, intimate friendship this had never happened before. Press of business had never kept him entirely away. Now she could not even get him to come to the telephone. She was not the only person who was attempting to see him on Lydia's behalf. Bobby Dorset had made several efforts, and finally caught him between the courthouse and his office. Bobby took the tone that the whole thing was fantastic; that O'Bannon was too much of a gentleman to send any girl to prison, irritating the man he had come to placate by something frivolous and unreal in his manner--the only manner Bobby knew. And then as Lydia's case grew darker Albee came. O'Bannon was in his study at home, the low-ceilinged room opening off the dining room. It had a great flat baize-covered desk, and low open shelves running round the walls, containing not only law books, but novels and early favorites--Henty and Lorna Doone and many records of travel and adventure. Here he was sitting, supposed to be at work on the Thorne case, about nine o'clock in the evening. Certainly his mind was occupied with it and the papers were laid out before him. He was going over and over, the same treadmill that his mind had been chained to ever since he had stood by Drummond's bedside with Alma Wooley clinging, weeping, to his hand. Lydia Thorne had committed a crime, and his duty was to present the case against the criminal. Sometimes of course a district attorney was justified in taking into consideration extenuating circumstances which could not always be brought out in court. But in this case there were no extenuating circumstances. Every circumstance he knew was against her. Her character was harsh and arrogant. She had already violated the law in bribing Drummond. First she had corrupted the poor boy, and then she had killed him. She deserved punishment more than most of the criminals who came into his court, and his duty was to present the case against her. He repeated it over and over to himself. Why, he was half a crook to consider this case as different from any other case--and if she did get off she wouldn't be grateful. She'd just assume that there had not been and never could be any question of convicting a woman like herself. He remembered her bending to look at him under the candle shades of the Piers' dinner table and announcing her disbelief in the equal administration of the laws. But yet, if she should come to him--if she would only come to him, pleading for herself as she had once for a few minutes pleaded for Evans----He could almost see her there in the circle of his reading light, close to him--could almost smell the perfume of violets.