“And if you had found it, you would have gone to the rendezvous, wouldn’t you?”
“I’d certainly have made every effort to.”
“Cancelling your poker engagement?”
“Presumably.”
“Taking the short cut across the fields?”
“I don’t know how I’d have gone. It’s slightly academic, isn’t it?”
“And in that gardener’s cottage you would have found waiting for you the unfortunate girl with those letters that it was so vitally necessary for you to obtain?”
“Why don’t you ask him whether he would still have had the knife in his pocket?” inquired Mr. Farr gently. “And why don’t you ask him what he would have done with it? You don’t want to leave anything like that out.”
Lambert, thus rudely checked in his exultant career, turned bulging eyes and a howl of outraged protest in the direction of Judge Carver’s unresponsive countenance.
“Your Honour, in a somewhat protracted career at the bar, I have yet to encounter as flagrant a breach——”