Alys sat up as rigidly as if armoured like Mrs. Battle. "What do you mean?" she breathed.
"Miss Austin has arrived at the conclusion that I am in love with Mrs. Balfame. She is an outsider with no data whatever to work on; it is reasonable to suppose that sooner or later our good fellow citizens will work round to the same theory."
"That is just the one theory they never will conceive or accept. They know better. That sort of thing never was in Mrs. Balfame's line. The women know that if she doesn't exactly hate men, she has a quiet but profound contempt for them. I wish you could have seen them—her particular crowd—at Mrs. Battle's the day of the arrest. Just to draw them out, I suggested that some man who was in love with her might have fired the shot. They nearly annihilated me. Mrs. Balfame, guilty of the crime of murder or not, is fairly screwed on her pedestal so far as the women are concerned. As for the men, such a theory will never occur to them for the simple reason that not one has ever been attracted by her; she's the very last woman they would expect any man to commit murder for."
Rush, wondering if these observations were dictated by venom or a mere regard for facts, shot a veiled glance at the divan; Miss Crumley's soft carefully de-Americanised voice had not sharpened, but her face was very mobile for all its reserve. She was looking almost aggressively impersonal and had sunk back against the high pillows in a limp indolent line. Facts, of course!
"It is very like a political campaign," said he. "Nobody is quite sane in this town just now, and the wildest conclusions are bound to be jumped at. It is not only embryo novelists that have romantic imaginations. Just reflect that I am Mrs. Balfame's counsel, that I am still a young man and unmarried, and that she is a beautiful woman and looks many years younger than her age. There you are."
Alys made an abrupt change of position which in one less graceful would have suggested a wriggle. However, her voice remained impersonal. "But this community, including her friends, believe that she did it. They want her to get off, but they have settled the question in their own minds and are not looking around for any one else."
"Cummack and several of the other men are, besides Balfame's old political pals—and his enemies, for that matter. Old Dutch, who is far shrewder than his son, is by no means certain of Mrs. Balfame's guilt and has put a detective on the job—against her acquittal, having no desire to see suspicion pointing at his house again. He is just the old sentimentalist to settle on me."
He saw the pink fade out of her cheeks, leaving her face like cold ivory, but she answered steadily: "You have your alibi. You went to Brooklyn that evening to keep an appointment."
"I don't mind telling you that although I went to Brooklyn that night I did not see the man I was after. I went on the spur of the moment, more because I wanted to get out of Elsinore than anything else; I didn't have time to telephone before catching the train, but when I left it in Brooklyn, I telephoned and found that he had gone to New York. I gave no name; it was a matter of no importance. Then as there was no one else I cared to talk to I took the next train back, and as my head ached and I felt as nervous as a cat—from overwork and other things—tramped for hours until I met Dr. Anna out by the marsh and she drove me in—"
"Dr. Anna?"