"She was speaking quite firmly now, in a clear though rather harsh voice: but that she was nervous, not to say frightened, was very obvious. She had a handkerchief in her hand, with which she fidgeted until it was nothing but a small, wet ball, and she had a habit of standing first on one foot then on the other, and of shifting the position of her hat. I do not think that there was a single member of the jury who did not think that she was lying, and she knew that they thought so, for now and again her fine dark eyes would scrutinise their faces and dart glances at them either of scorn or of anxiety.
"After a while she appeared very tired, and when pressed by the coroner over some trifling matters, she broke down and began to cry. After which she was allowed to stand down, and Mr. Reuben Levison was called.
"I must say that I took an instinctive dislike to him as he stood before the jury with a jaunty air of complete self-possession. He had a keen, yet shifty eye, and sharp features very like a rodent. To me it appeared at once that he was reciting a lesson rather than giving independent evidence. He stated that he had been present at dinner during the quarrel between his mother and sister-in-law, and his mother was certainly very angry at the moment, but later on he went upstairs to bid her good-night. She cried a little and said a few hard things, but in the end she gave way to him as she always did: she opened the safe, got out the diamond stars and gave them to him, making him promise to return them the very first thing in the morning.
"'I told her,' Reuben went on glibly, 'that I would not be home until the Monday morning. I would see Rebecca into a taxi after the ball, but I had the intention of spending a couple of nights and the intervening Sunday with a pal who had a flat at Haverstock Hill. I thought then that my mother would lock the stars up again, however—she was always a woman of her word—once she had said a thing she would stick to it—and so as I said she gave me the stars and Mrs. Aaron wore them that night.'
"'And you handed the stars to Mrs. Aaron at half-past nine?'
"The coroner asked the question with the same earnest emphasis which he had displayed when he put it to young Mrs. Levison. I saw Reuben's shifty eye flash across at her, and I know that she answered that flash with a slight drop of her eyelids. Whereupon he replied as readily as she had done:
"'Yes, sir, it must have been about half-past nine.'
"And I assure you that every intelligent person in that room must have felt certain that Reuben was lying just as Rebecca had done before him."
§4
The Old Man in the Corner paused in his narrative. He drank half a glass of milk, smacked his lips, and for a few moments appeared intent on examining one of the complicated knots which he had made in his bit of string. Then after a while he resumed.