“I ran all the way from the station,” gasped the red-headed girl. “Every step. There’s not a taxi in this whole abominable place. And you were gone last night before I had a chance to ask you what you thought of the prosecutor’s speech.”
“Perhaps that’s why I went.”
“No, truly, what did you think of it?”
“Well, I think that boys being boys, jurors being jurors, prosecutors being prosecutors, and Mrs. Patrick Ives being Mrs. Patrick Ives, he did about as well as could be expected—better than I expected.”
“He can’t prove all those things, can he?” asked the red-headed girl, looking a little pale.
“Ah, that’s it! When you get right down to it, the only things of any importance that he claimed he was going to prove were in one last sentence: That Bellamy and Sue Ives met and went to the front parlour of the gardener’s cottage, to confront Mimi Bellamy—that’s his case. And a pretty good case, too, if you ask me. The rest of it was just a lot of good fancy, expansive words strung together in order to create pity, horror, prejudice, and suspicion in the eyes of the jury. And granted that purpose, they weren’t bad words, though there were a few bits that absolutely yelled for ‘Hearts and Flowers’ on muted strings somewhere in the background—that little piece about going through the starlight to her lover. . . .”
“I thought the idea was that the prosecutor was after truth, not a conviction,” said the red-headed girl gravely.
“The ideal, not the idea, my child. You didn’t precisely get the notion that he was urging the jury to consider that, though there was a pretty strong case against Mrs. Ives and Stephen Bellamy, there were a whole lot of other people who might have done it too—or did you?”
“He certainly said most distinctly that he wasn’t any bloodhound baying for a victim.”
“Well, if he isn’t, I’ll bet that he gives such a good imitation of one that if Eliza should happen to hear him while she was crossing the ice she’d take two cakes at one jump. What did I tell you about Mr. Farr and the classics? Did you get ‘she loved not wisely but too well’? That beats ‘I could not not love thee, dear, so much.’ ”