"Besides," he said, "the necklace wasn't yours. You don't want to bring Mrs. Blake to book for stealing a necklace which isn't your own?"
"But I'm not doing it for myself," said Lydia instantly. "It's for Jeffrey."
"But, Jeffrey—" Alston paused. He wanted to put it with as little offence as might be. "Jeffrey has been tried for a certain offence and found guilty."
"He wasn't really guilty," said Lydia. "Can't you see he wasn't? Esther stole the necklace, and Madame Beattie wanted it paid for, and Jeffrey tried to do it and everything went to pieces. Can't you really see?"
She asked it anxiously, and Alston answered her with the more gentleness because her solicitude made her so kind and fair.
"Now," said he, "this is the way it is. Jeffrey pleaded guilty and was sentenced. If everything you say is true—we'll assume it is—he would have been tried just the same, and he would have been sentenced just the same. I don't say his counsel mightn't have whipped up a lot of sympathy from the jury, but he wouldn't have got off altogether. And besides, you wouldn't have had him escape in any such conceivable way. You wouldn't have had him shield himself behind his wife."
Lydia was looking at him with brows drawn tight in her effort to get quite clearly what she thought might prove at any instant a befogged technicality. But it all sounded reasonable enough, and she gratefully understood he was laying aside the jurist's phraseology for her sake.
"But," said she, "mightn't Esther have been tried for stealing the necklace?"
He couldn't help laughing, she seemed so ingenuously anxious to lay Esther by the heels. Then he sobered, for her inhumanity to Esther seemed to him incredible.
"Why, yes," said he, "if she had been suspected, if there'd been evidence—"