“I heard what you were saying just now, Sir Gilbert,” she murmured low, but with marked emphasis, after a few polite commonplaces of conversation had first passed between them; “and I want to ask you one question only about the matter. ARE you so sure as you seem of what you said this minute? Are you so sure that Mr. Guy Waring HAD sufficient reasons of his own for wishing to leave the country?”
Before that unflinching eye, the great lawyer trembled, as many a witness had trembled of old under his own cross-examination. But he tried to pass it off just at first with a little society banter. He bowed, and smiled, and pretended to look arch—look arch, indeed, with that ashen, white face of his!—as he answered, with forced humour—
“My dear young lady, Mr. Guy Waring, as I understand, is Mr. Cyril Waring’s brother, and as by the law of England the king can do no wrong, so I suppose—”
Elma cut him short in the middle of his sentence with an imperious gesture. He had never cut short an obnoxious and intruding barrister himself with more crushing dignity.
“Mr. Cyril Waring has nothing at all to do with the point, one way or the other,” the girl said severely. “Attend to my question. What I ask is this: Why do you, a judge who may one day be called upon to try the case, venture to say, on such partial evidence, that Mr. Guy Waring had sufficient reasons of his own for leaving the country?”
Called upon to try Guy Waring’s case! The judge paused abashed. He was very much afraid of her. This girl had such a strange look about the eyes, she made him tremble. People said the Ewes women were the descendants of a witch. And there was something truly witch-like in the way Elma Clifford looked straight down into his eyes. She seemed to see into his very soul. He knew she suspected him.
He shuffled and temporized. “Well, everybody says so, you know,” he answered, shrugging his shoulders carelessly. “And what everybody says MUST be true. ... Besides, if HE, didn’t do it, who did, I wonder?”
Elma pounced upon her opportunity with a woman’s quickness. “Somebody else who was at Mambury that day, no doubt,” she replied, with a meaning look. “It MUST have been somebody out of the few who were at Mambury.”
That home-thrust told. The judge’s colour was livid to look upon. What could this girl mean? How on earth could she know? How had she even found out he was at Mambury at all? A terrible doubt oppressed his soul. Had Gwendoline confided his movements to Elma? He had warned his daughter time and again not to mention the fact, “for fear of misapprehension,” he said, with shuffling eyes askance. It was better nobody should know he had been anywhere near Dartmoor on the day of the accident.
However, there was one consolation; the law! the law! She could have no legal proof, and intuition goes for nothing in a court of justice. All the suspicion went against Guy Waring, and Guy Waring—well, Guy Waring had fled the kingdom in the very nick of time, and was skulking now, Heaven alone knew where or why, in the remotest depths of some far African diggings.