Doyle was about to interrupt, but Kennedy, who had not for a moment, even at this crisis, forgotten to glance quickly at one of the instrument dials after another, pulled him back and silenced him without a spoken word.
"You say there was a woman there?" she swept on, taking up the story, as though seizing it from Shattuck. "There was a woman there. It was I. I was with him."
The thing came as another thunderbolt, as it were, before the reverberation of the first had ceased echoing.
Not one of us but realized what it meant. Honora had cast reputation, all, to the winds, to save him!
She looked about at us, and never have I seen a woman more appealing, not even in any of the great moments of great cases in court which it has been my fortune to have witnessed and to have written. Cynic though I am, and knowing, as I thought at the moment, the purpose of it all, to save the man she loved, I could not resist the appeal. Nor was it directed at me. So marvelous was she that she took in the whole group, at once appealing to each, as if a sudden power had become hers.
Quickly she poured forth her story, as though she, too, feared interruption.
"It is all true—all that he has told," she cried. "I saw it all—heard it. But there is more—more that he will not tell. He has not told the whole story. Listen."
It seemed as if she realized for the first time the power of an emotional woman. And her very instinct told her how to play upon us.
"I knew the Calabar bean," she explained. "I need not tell Professor Kennedy that. Of course, as he knows, I had seen them in my father's laboratory, at his shop. And so, when I knew what it was that was taking place—what was I to do?"
She paused, as though her intuition told her that the playing up of a dramatic moment would cover a multitude of questions that might otherwise come awkwardly flocking and demanding an answer as to much that she had not explained.