We remained alone and singularly quiet the whole of that evening. That my dear lady’s active brain was hard at work I could guess by the brilliance of her eyes, and that sort of absolute stillness in her person through which one could almost feel the delicate nerves vibrating.
The story told her by the lawyer had moved her singularly. Mind you, she had always been morally convinced of young Smethick’s innocence, but in her the professional woman always fought hard battles against the sentimentalist, and in this instance the overwhelming circumstantial evidence and the conviction of her superiors had forced her to accept the young man’s guilt as something out of her ken.
By his silence, too, the young man had tacitly confessed; and if a man is perceived on the very scene of a crime, both before it has been committed and directly afterwards; if something admittedly belonging to him is found within three yards of where the murderer must have stood; if, added to this, he has had a bitter quarrel with the victim, and can give no account of his actions or whereabouts during the fatal time, it were vain to cling to optimistic beliefs in that same man’s innocence.
But now matters had assumed an altogether different aspect. The story told by Mr. Smethick’s lawyer had all the appearance of truth. Margaret Ceely’s character, her callousness on the very day when her late fiancé stood in the dock, her quick transference of her affections to the richer man, all made the account of the events on Christmas night as told by Mr. Grayson extremely plausible.
No wonder my dear lady was buried in thought.
“I shall have to take the threads up from the beginning, Mary,” she said to me the following morning, when after breakfast she appeared in her neat coat and skirt, with hat and gloves, ready to go out, “so, on the whole, I think I will begin with a visit to the Haggetts.”
“I may come with you, I suppose?” I suggested meekly.
“Oh, yes!” she rejoined carelessly.
Somehow I had an inkling that the carelessness of her mood was only on the surface. It was not likely that she—my sweet, womanly, ultra-feminine, beautiful lady—should feel callously on this absorbing subject.
We motored down to Bishopthorpe. It was bitterly cold, raw, damp, and foggy. The chauffeur had some difficulty in finding the cottage, the “home” of the imbecile gardener and his wife.