Lambert glared—swallowed—glared again, and turned on his heel. “Mrs. Ives, will you be good enough to take the stand?”
She was on her feet before the words were off his lips, brushing by him with her light, swift step and a look of contemptuous anger that was bright and terrible as a sword.
“Looks as though his precious Sue was going to give Uncle Dudley a bad half hour,” murmured the reporter exultantly.
“Why?” whispered the red-headed girl. “Why did she look like that?”
“Because I rather fancy that Lambert has just a scrap exceeded his authority in his efforts to speed Pat Ives to the gallows. The old walrus made out a fairly damaging case against him, even if he did snort himself purple. If——”
“Mrs. Ives, I’m going to ask you to tell us in your own words just what occurred on the evening of the nineteenth of June, from the time that Mr. Farwell spoke to you at the club. I won’t interrupt unless I feel that something is not quite clear. At what time did the conversation with Mr. Farwell take place?”
She looked so small, sitting there—so small and young and fearless, with her dark, bright eyes and her lifted chin and the pale gold wings of her hair folded under the curve of the little russet hat. She had no colour at all—not in her cheeks, not in her lips.
“It was a little after five,” said Sue Ives, and the red-headed girl gave a sigh of sheer delight. Once or twice in a lifetime a voice like that falls on our lucky ears—a voice clear and fresh as running water, alive and beautiful and effortless. The girl in the box did not have to lift it a half tone to have it penetrate to the farthest corner of the gallery. “We got in from the links just at five, and Elliot came up and asked me if he could bring me something to drink. I said yes, and when he came back he suggested that we go over and sit on the steps, as he had a splitting headache, and everyone was making a good deal of a racket. We hadn’t been there more than five minutes before he told me.”
“Before he told you what?” prompted Lambert helpfully.
“Before he told me that Pat was having an affair with Mimi Bellamy.” She did not vouchsafe him even a glance, but kept the clear, stern little face turned squarely to the twelve attentive ones lifted to hers. “At first I thought that it was simply preposterous nonsense—I told him so. Everyone knew that Elliot was absolutely out of his head over Mimi, and I thought that he really was going a little mad. I could see that he’d been drinking, of course, and I wasn’t even as angry as I ought to have been, because he was so unhappy—dreadfully unhappy. And then he said that he’d spied on them—that he’d seen them go to the cottage together. Well, that—that was different. That didn’t sound like the kind of thing that you’d invent or imagine, no matter how unbalanced you were.”