Doves wheeled above the city's winter morning, vanishing by a turn of wings, reappearing in a silent explosion of light. Judge Terence Mann saw smoke rising through windless cold from a thousand chimneys, and saw, beyond a bleak acreage of city roofs, the apartment house that contained his bachelor burrow; further on, the Veterans Hospital shone not as a temple of sickness but a shaft of splendor in the sun. His eyes smarted as he turned away from the brightness. 

That was partly from a lack of sleep. The Judge remembered that, like this robing-room, the detention cells also looked up across the long rise of land where, for something like three hundred years, the city had been haphazardly expanding, fattening on river commerce, and becoming--in the American sense--old.

Some day, should the small gods in the state capital approve, the city of Winchester would own a Civic Center near that hospital, with a new county courthouse. Judge Mann had seen an architect's dream picture in the Egypto-lavatory style, a kind of streamlined cake of soap--optimistic in a time when Winchester's population of 80,000 was remaining constant while suburbs oozed in heedless growth over the once magnificent countryside. In any case this late-Victorian-Gothic firetrap downtown would have to serve for the ordeal of The People vs. Blake.

He shoved the black sleeve clear of his wristwatch: 10:10. Short, slight, his temples silvering at forty-seven; few wrinkles yet; a thin flexible mouth suggesting kindness; in his square forehead the pucker of certain chronic doubts. He checked his pockets for reading glasses and aspirin while his attendant Joe Bass brushed at imaginary lint.

"Mr. Delehanty says there's quite a crowd, Judge."

"Do they need more bailiffs out there?"

"I wouldn't think so--just noisy. They all want in." Pink-faced, lightly wrinkled, Joe could shift at will from a glorified valet to a literate old man. "Maybe the rumors about the girl's deformity make them curious, same as if she were a Hollywood dish."

"Oh, I understand her deformity's pretty slight. It's just the radio and papers--sensationalism--public wants a circus. Well, I'm late."

"Technically, sir, you are. But after three years on the bench, you know it isn't ten o'clock till you pass through that door."

"Uh-huh--Joshua never had it so good. Well, here we go ..."

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