"I object!" pronounced Elmen.
"Overruled," said the judge. "You offered these matters. I cannot forbid cross-examination upon them."
"I save an exception!" ordered Elmen, and Joan Daisy knew that she must answer and again she must lie.
"Do you remember under what name your family was registered at that hotel?" Calvin proceeded.
"I object!" protested Elmen.
"Overruled."
"Enter an exception!" Elmen commanded the stenographer, and as the question, which the witness was obliged to answer, was one which he had not foreseen, he signaled an answer to her by clasping his hands, the left over the right.
This meant, "Answer no," and Joan Daisy saw the sign, but "no" would be another lie, and what would be the use of it? Herself, she had told Mr. Clarke on the night of their meeting in the automat how she had spent her life when she was little, "dead-beating and dodging sheriffs and being thrown out of flats and hotels." Moreover, to answer "no" would be an admission that her family had gone under many names, otherwise of course she would remember the name.
"Ravenel—John Mersfield Ravenel was the name my father used at that time," she replied.
"You also used the name Ravenel?"
"I object!" protested Elmen hotly. The judge overruled and Elmen entered another exception, and now after nearly every question Elmen objected, the judge overruled, Elmen entered an exception until their combat ran into a sort of refrain, "object: overruled: exception," as Calvin delivered his prepared attack.
Upon the table beside him lay a report, written up in minute detail by department operatives who had improved the weeks following Ketlar's arrest by a thorough
