"And that was," said Mrs. Bobby breathlessly, "on the twenty-third of December. You are sure?"
"Quite sure," said the girl listlessly, "but what difference does it make? I wouldn't tell Mr. Fenton—I said I couldn't remember what I did that day, and I wouldn't tell you now, if I thought that you could send for him. You can't send for him, can you?" She looked at Mrs. Bobby with sudden alarm. "You really don't know where he is?"
"Upon my word and honor," Mrs. Bobby assured her, "I don't." And then she said little more, but kissed Elizabeth presently, bade her keep up her courage, and left sooner than she generally did.
"No, I don't know where he is," she said to herself, as the hansom bore her swiftly up-town, and she stared out absently at the deserted streets. "We don't know, but please God, we shall soon. If only that man finds him, if he can only get him here in time."
Chapter XXXIV
This was in the early summer; and Elizabeth's trial was to be in November. The time approached, and nothing had been heard of Julian Gerard. Efforts were made to postpone the trial, that this important witness might have time to appear. But the influence of people like the Van Antwerps, which seems in some ways all-powerful, is in others curiously slight. The District Attorney was acting in the interests of the yellow journals and they, according to their own account, in the interests of the people, which required, as they set forth in high-sounding editorials, that no more favor should be shown to Miss Van Vorst than to the lowest criminal.
After all, the girl's health had suffered so severely from the long confinement that it seemed a cruelty to lengthen it, even with the hope of Gerard's return. Mr. Fenton himself was of opinion that the trial should not be postponed. He had done his best for his client, though hampered more, perhaps, than he realized by his secret doubt of everything she said. He did not believe in this alibi, which she had trumped up, as he decided, when the one person who could confirm or deny it was safely out of the way. Yet he tried to find some other witness who remembered, or imagined having seen her at the Museum on the morning when she was supposed to have been in Brooklyn. No such person could be found. The case for the defence was lamentably weak. Mr. Fenton admitted the fact to himself with a shrug of the shoulders, and fell back philosophically on his conviction that no jury would send a young woman of Elizabeth's position and attractions to the electric chair.