There
was no sign or sound of life save for the continuous buzzing in his own
ears, but after a moment Anthony himself broke the silence with a
distinct and peculiar murmur. It was the sound that he had consistently
attempted to make back there in the Boul' Mich', when he had been face
to face with Bloeckman--the unmistakable sound of ironic laughter. And
on his torn and bleeding lips it was like a pitiful retching of
the soul.
Three weeks later the trial came to an end. The seemingly endless spool
of legal red tape having unrolled over a period of four and a half
years, suddenly snapped off. Anthony and Gloria and, on the other side,
Edward Shuttleworth and a platoon of beneficiaries testified and lied
and ill-behaved generally in varying degrees of greed and desperation.
Anthony awoke one morning in March realizing that the verdict was to be
given at four that afternoon, and at the thought he got up out of his
bed and began to dress. With his extreme nervousness there was mingled
an unjustified optimism as to the outcome. He believed that the decision
of the lower court would be reversed, if only because of the reaction,
due to excessive prohibition, that had recently set in against reforms
and reformers.
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