“ ‘But, Ruth,’ he cried desperately, ‘it isn’t me you’ve got to convince—it’s the police. A man couldn’t have got out of that window in the time. It’s a physical impossibility. If you told it to the police, they’d laugh. Tell us the truth, my dear. I beseech you. Tell us the truth, and we’ll see what can be done.’
“She stood very still, with her hands clenched by her sides. And then quite deliberately she spoke to Shoreham.
“ ‘If you don’t believe there was a man here,’ she said, ‘you must think I shot my husband. There was no one else who could have done it. Well—supposing I did. You acknowledge no justification for such an act?’
“I started to speak, but she silenced me with an imperative wave of her hand.
“ ‘Please, Bill——Well, Ned—I’m waiting. If I did shoot him—what then?’ ”
The Barrister paused to relight his cigar, and the others waited in silence.
“She was staring at Shoreham,” he went on after a while, “with a faint, half-mocking, wholly tender smile on her lips, and if either he or I had been less dense that smile should have made us think. But at the moment I was absorbed in the problem of how to save her; while she was absorbed in a very different one concerning the mentality of the man she cared for. And Shoreham—well, he was absorbed in the old, old fight between love and duty, and the fierceness of the struggle was showing on his face.
“There in front of him stood the woman he loved, the woman who had just shot her husband, and the woman who was now free for him to marry. He knew as well as I did that in adopting the line I had suggested lay the best chance of getting her acquitted. He knew as well as I did that the vast majority of juries would acquit if the story were put to them as we had outlined it. He could visualise as well as I the scene in court. Counsel for the defence—I’d already fixed on Grayson in my mind as her counsel—outlining the whole scene: her late husband’s abominable conduct culminating in this final outrage at her reception. And then as he came to the moment of the tragedy, I could picture him turning to the jury with passionate sincerity in his face—appealing to them as men—happily married, perhaps, but men, at any rate, to whom home life was sacred.
“I could hear his voice—low and earnest—as he sketched for them that last scene. This poor, slighted, tormented woman—girl, gentlemen, for she is little more than a girl—went in desperation to the man—well, he is dead now, and we will leave it at that—to the man who had made her life a veritable hell. She pleaded with him, gentlemen, to allow her to divorce him—pleaded for some remnant of decent feelings in him. And what was his answer—what was the answer of this devil who was her husband? Did he meet her half-way? Did he profess the slightest sorrow for his despicable conduct?
“No, gentlemen—not one word. His sole response was to spring at her in his drunken frenzy and endeavour to fix his vile attentions on her. And she, mad with terror and fright, snatched up the revolver which was lying on the desk. It might have been a ruler—anything; she was not responsible at the moment for what she did. Do you blame her, gentlemen? You have daughters of your own. She no more knew what she had in her hand than a baby would. To keep him away—that was her sole idea. And then—suddenly—it happened. The revolver went off—the man fell dead.