"Anna is ill," she articulated. "Anna! My one real friend—the only one that has meant anything to me. Life has gone pretty well with me. Now everything is changed. I know that terrible things are about to happen to me."
"Not while I am alive. I heard of Dr. Anna's illness on my way to New York. Lequeur was on the train. You—you must let me take her place. I am devoted to you heart and soul. You surely know that."
"But you are not a woman. It's a woman friend I want now, a strong one like Anna. Those other women—oh, yes, they're devoted to me—have been, but they've suddenly ceased to count, somehow. Besides, they'll soon believe me guilty. I hate them all. Only Anna would have understood—and believed."
Rush had been administering awkward little pats to the soft masses of her hair. Suddenly he realised that his faith in her complete innocence was by no means as stable as it had been; she had confessed to him that she had been in the grove that night stalking the intruder. How absurd to believe that she had gone out unarmed. He had read the circumstantial details of the reporter's interviews with Frieda and young Kraus. While the writers were careful not to make the downright assertion that Mrs. Balfame had fired the fatal shot, the public saw her in the act of levelling one of the pistols—so mighty is the power of the trained and ruthless pen.
As he stood looking down upon his unexpected surrender to emotional excitement, he asked himself deliberately: What more natural, if she had a pistol in her hand and that low-lived creature presented himself abruptly and alone, than that it should go off of its own accord, so to speak, whether hers had been the bullet to penetrate that loathsome target or not? If so, what had she done with the pistol?
He sat down and laid his hand firmly on her arm.
"There is something I must tell you. It is something Frieda forgot to tell the reporter, but she gave it to the Grand Jury. With the help of a couple of extra gin fizzes, I extracted it from Gore. It is this: she told the Grand Jury that several times when she did her weekly cleaning upstairs she saw a pistol in the drawer of a table beside your bed. Will—won't you tell me?"
He felt the arm in his clasp grow rigid, but Mrs. Balfame answered without a trace of her recent agitation: "I told you before that I never had a pistol. It would be like her to be spying about among my things, but I wonder she would admit it."
"She is delighted with her new importance, and, I fancy, has been bribed to tell all she knows."
"In that case she wouldn't mind telling more. And no doubt she will think of other sensational items before the trial. She will have awakened in the night after the crime and heard me drop the pistol between the walls, or she will have seen me loading it on the afternoon of the shooting."