“I don’t remember seeing a bag, but she might well have had one.”
“She did not speak to you?”
“No.”
“And those were the two times that you refer to?”
“Oh, no,” corrected Mrs. Ives gently. “I thought of those occasions as forming one time. I saw her again, a good deal later in the evening.”
Once more the courtroom was filled with that strange stir—the movement of hundreds of bodies moving an inch nearer to the edges of chairs.
“Good Lord!” murmured the reporter devoutly. “She’s going to give the girl an alibi! Look out, you old fox!”
The prosecutor, thus disrespectfully and inaudibly adjured, moved boldly forward. “At what time did you see your daughter-in-law, Mrs. Ives?”
“You’ve got to grant him nerve,” continued the reporter, unabashed. “Or probably he’s betting that the old lady wouldn’t perjure herself even to save her son’s wife. I’d rather bet it myself.”
Mrs. Ives, who had been sitting silently studying her linked fingers, raised an untroubled countenance to the prosecutor’s, but for the first time she spoke as though she were weighing her words: “It is difficult for me to give you the exact time, as I did not look at a clock. I had been in bed for quite a little while, however, and had turned out the light. I should say, roughly, that it might have been half-past ten. It was quite dark when I came into the house myself, I remember, and I believe that it stayed light at that time until long after nine.”