girl. Catering to the perennial hunger for a scapegoat, most of the papers were writing of Callista Blake on a note of hate just inside libel--Crippled Teen-Age Intellectual, Prodigy Girl in the Monkshood Case. But that carried a phony note, for Callista Blake had managed to remain so essentially unknown that so far there was really no one to hate but a paper image. Some voices dissented, too. One sob sister had declared Callista was a woman, with human needs, feelings, a tragic childhood. That writer might have read an article on psychiatry--even two articles.There were certain letters, from Callista Blake to her lover James
Doherty, the last one written about a week before Doherty's wife was
found dead--poisoned and drowned. If those letters arrived in evidence
over the protests of Cecil Warner, they would demonstrate Callista
Blake's humanity more intensely than any journalistic gulping.

Judge Mann had read them, Cecil Warner and District Attorney Lamson
present. James Doherty, Lamson said, had handed over the first three
voluntarily. The fourth, found in Callista Blake's possession, had not
been mailed to Doherty. For Mann, to read them had been like blundering
into a private room where lovers clung together with locked loins and
tortured faces; like being compelled to watch, afterward, when the woman
was alone and wounded with loss. He had skimmed, his mind wincing aside,
knowing it was not possible to understand the letters under those
conditions. They had not been read to the grand jury. Some passages in
them might be construed as admissions of guilt--or not, as you pleased.
Warner evidently felt that this notion could be demolished.

As for beauty and glamor, the prosecution would introduce other
photographs of Ann Doherty that were no pretty portraits. Old Warner
would object routinely and be overruled; the jury would then meet the
unmitigated spectacle of a death by drowning. When Ophelia perishes
offstage you don't think of post-mortem lividity or foam on the mouth.

"Mr. District Attorney?"

Assistant District Attorney Talbot J. Hunter nodded briskly but
solemnly: he was being the man who profoundly regrets what he must do.
That had not been altogether predictable. Dealing with professional
crooks, T. J. could act downright jolly in a ferocious give-nothing way,
often sweeping a jury along. With a tiger's grace, handsome in spite of

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