“I was absolutely sure that I saw a light over the garage, but it certainly wasn’t there a minute or so afterwards, and I decided that I might as well go in anyway. I was beyond bothering much about any minor conventions, and I thought that if Mimi were actually there, it would be a heavenly relief to put all the cards on the table and have it out with her once and forever. Mimi wasn’t there, of course; it was then that Steve called up the Conroys. When he found that she wasn’t there, I was really terrified at his condition. He was as quiet as usual, but he didn’t seem to understand anything at all that was said to him. He didn’t even bother to listen. He had some kind of a chill, and he just sat there shivering, while I reassured and argued and explained.
“I could have saved my breath. He didn’t even hear me. He did finally rouse himself to telephone the police and the hospital; the rest of the time he just sat there staring and shivering. He wanted me to call up Pat and the Dallases, and of course I knew that that wouldn’t do any good—Pat was locked up two stories away from a telephone. Finally I asked, ‘Did you see what direction she was going in when she left?’ He shook his head. I said, ‘But she told you that she was going toward the Conroys’?’ He nodded. I said, ‘Well, maybe she turned her ankle and fainted somewhere along the side of the road—she always wears such dreadfully high heels. We might take the car and turn the headlights along the edge of the road and see if we can get any trace of her. Come on!’
“I knew that that was perfect nonsense, but I was desperate, and I thought that there was just a chance that it might rouse him. It did. It was exactly as though you’d put a galvanic shock through him. He jerked out of his chair. He was out in the hall without even waiting to look back at me, and I had to run to get to the car before he started it.
“We got off with such a jerk that it nearly threw me out of the car, and I was really afraid that he was going to dash us against one of the gateposts. I said, ‘If we’re going to find Mimi, Steve, we must go slowly, mustn’t we? We must look carefully.’ He said, ‘That’s right!’ And after that we literally crept, all the way to the Conroys’.”
“How far was that?”
“Oh, not far—not half a mile—just a little way. It wasn’t until after we got past their entrance that we decided that——” She paused for a moment, her eyes dilated strangely in her small pale face; then she wrung her hands together more closely as though in that hard contact she found comfort, and continued steadily in her low voice. “We decided that we might as well go on.”
Lambert, paler than she, said just as steadily, “Might as well go on where, Mrs. Ives?”
“Go on to the gardener’s cottage at Orchards,” said Susan Ives.
In the gray light of the courtroom, the faces of the occupants looked gray, too—sharpened, fearful, full of an ominous unease. More than one of them glanced swiftly over a hunched shoulder at the blue-coated guardians of the door, and then back again, with somewhat pinched and rueful countenance, at the slight occupant of the witness box. The figure sat so quietly there in the gathering shadows; to many who watched it seemed that there slanted across her lifted face another shadow still—the shadow of the block, of the gallows, of the chair. . . .
“Is she confessing?” asked the red-headed girl in a small colourless voice.