Ronald, when Caroline Staley woke him on that first morning of the trial, thought neither of Hector nor of Aliette. Hardly, he thought to himself. To win--and, now that the contest so long anticipated was actually at hand, he felt that not to win outright would be disaster--seemed almost impossible, the forlornest of hopes.
Dressing, breakfasting, making his way to Putney Bridge Station, his mind held only the picture of his client. Visited overnight, the woman--whose likeness to his own woman never failed to strike a responsive chord in Ronnie's heart--had afforded no help. Curiously resigned to an adverse verdict, curiously incurious as to whether that verdict should be murder or manslaughter, the tense clamor of the newspapers and the tense pleading of her counsel left her alike unmoved.
"I'll go into the witness-box if you like, sir," she had consented. "But I don't see what good it'll do. I can only tell them the truth. And I told them that at the police-station. I never was a liar, sir. I did it to save Bob."
"I did it to save Bob!" Those words still echoed in the barrister's ears as he emerged from the gloom of Temple station into sunlight, and turned down the Embankment toward his chambers, where--Bunce, brief and witnesses for the defense being already on their way to the court--John Cartwright alone awaited him.
The solicitor was in his gloomiest mood, thoroughly convinced of Lucy's guilt.
"Unless Brunton fails on the issue of premeditation," he said, "we haven't got a dog's chance. Even if he does fail on that point, she'll get seven years."
At that, poignantly, the human element of the case came home to Ronnie. It seemed to him as though he saw Aliette's self imprisoned, beating out her heart--day after day, month after month, year after year--against the cold walls and the cold bars of a prison-house.
"Not if I can help it," he said hotly.
"Have you decided to put her in the box? H. B.'s a holy terror for cross-examination."
"Of course I shall put her in the box. I'm not afraid of H. B.! Let's be off."