“A little after half-past eleven.”
The prosecutor stood eyeing the heavy countenance before him speculatively for a moment, and then, with a quick shake of his narrow, sleek, finely poised head, took his decision. “Mr. Farwell, when did you first tell the story that you have been telling us?”
“On June twenty-first.”
“Where did you tell it?”
“In your office.”
“At whose request?”
“At——”
Mr. Lambert, who had been sitting twitching in his chair, emitted a roar of protest as he bounded to his feet that effectually drowned out any information Mr. Farwell was about to impart. “I object, Your Honour! I object! What does it matter whether this witness told his story in the prosecutor’s office or the Metropolitan Opera House? The point is that he’s telling it here, and anything else is deliberately beside the mark. I——”
“The Court is inclined to agree with you, Mr. Lambert. What is the object of establishing when, where, and why Mr. Farwell told this story, Mr. Farr?”
“Because, Your Honour, it is entirely owing to the insistence of the state that Mr. Farwell is at present making a series of admissions that if misinterpreted by the jury might be highly prejudicial to Mr. Farwell. There is not one chance in a hundred that the defense would have brought out under cross-examination the fact that Mr. Farwell was at the gardener’s cottage on the nineteenth of June—a fact that I have deliberately elicited in my zeal to set all the available facts before the jury. But in common fairness to Mr. Farwell, I think that I should be permitted to bring out the circumstances under which I obtained this information.”