further!"

"She is dismissed!" returned the judge, glowering over his spectacles
at the young lawyer.

"I stand on--"

"Sit down!" the judge bellowed.

"Miss Carmen!" called Cass through the rising tumult, "the lawyer for
the prosecution has heaped insults upon you in his low references to
your parentage. Will you--"

The judge pounded upon his desk with the remnant of his broken gavel.
Then he summoned the bailiffs.

"I shall order the room cleared!" he called in a loud, threatening
voice.

The murmur subsided. The judge sat down and mopped his steaming face.
Hood and Ellis bent in whispered consultation. Ames was a study of
wild, infuriated passion. Cass stood defiantly before the bar. Carmen
sat quietly facing the crowded room. She had reached up and was
fondling the little locket which hung at her throat. It was the first
time she had ever worn it. It was not a pretty piece of jewelry; and
it had never occurred to her to wear it until that day. Nor would she
have thought of it then, had not the Beaubien brought it to the Tombs
the night before in a little box with some papers which the girl had
called for. Why she had put it on, she could not say.

Slowly, while the silence continued unbroken, the girl drew the
slender chain around in front of her and unclasped it.

"I--I never--knew my parents," she murmured musingly, looking down
lovingly at the little locket. Then she opened it and sat gazing, rapt
and absorbed, at the two little portraits within. "But there are their
pictures," she suddenly announced, holding the locket out to Cass.

It was said afterward that never in the history of legal procedure in
New York had that court room held such dead silence as when Cass stood
bending over the faces of the girl's earthly parents, portrayed in the
strange little locket which Rosendo had taken from Badillo years
before. Never had it known such a tense moment; never had the very air
itself seemed so filled with a mighty, unseen presence, as on that day
and in that crisal hour.

Without speaking, Hood rose and looked over Cass's shoulder at the
locket. A muffled cry escaped him, and he turned and stared at Ames.
The judge bent shaking over his desk.

"Mr. Hood!" he exclaimed. "Have you ever seen those pictures before?"

"Yes, sir," replied Hood in a voice that was scarcely heard.

"Where, sir?"

Hood seemed to have frozen to the spot. His hands shook, and his words
gibbered from his trembling lips.