"There's a little place just around the corner where I usually go, but I can't eat. It's just as if my heart had settled up in my throat and closed it." Her face was working piteously. "I shall go crazy if I can't talk to somebody, Miss. I feel as if each hour was the end; that I couldn't go on any longer."
Betty led the way to the modest little restaurant and when they were seated opposite each other at the narrow, linoleum topped table and the order given, she leaned compassionately toward her sorrowful guest.
"Tell me what you can, Miss Pope. I sympathize with you deeply, more deeply than you know, and I would do anything that I could to help you in your trouble. I have not forgotten that you tried to do me a good turn, even if you could not explain, and I am grateful."
Miss Pope's faded eyes lighted with sudden interest.
"You're still there, in that house? You haven't been dismissed yet, and you are free to come and go as you please! Oh, Miss Shaw, keep your eyes open and think twice of anything you are asked to do. Don't let yourself be led into what you don't understand. I'm talking too much, I know, but I can't seem to even think straight these days." She paused, and the old look of hopeless misery dulled her eyes once more. "Since Robbie's wife was killed, and they took him away, it seems as if I'd lived in a nightmare."
"How did it all happen?" asked Betty.
"Robbie and his wife lived apart. She's dead, and the least said about her the better, but she was a disgrace to a decent man. One morning, about three months ago, they found her dead in her bed with her head beaten in. Robbie was questioned, but he didn't know anything about it, he hadn't seen her in nearly a year. He was left free then and the police went after another man, but, because they couldn't find him, they fastened on Robbie again. You heard the evidence this morning, Miss. He has a temper, for all he's so meek-looking, and he had cause enough to kill her, Heaven knows, but he never did it, never, although he had made threats, like anybody who is tried beyond endurance."
She paused in her rapid flow of words and wiped her eyes on a wisp of handkerchief while Betty sat silent, with every nerve taut.
"There was a terrible snowstorm, the biggest one of the year, on the night she was killed," Miss Pope went on. "Robbie is the chauffeur for the King family, of Hempstead; it's Mr. King who is paying for the defense. He ordered Robbie to take the car into town that night to meet some folks who were arriving from the West, but Robbie never got there; he was stalled in a snowdrift all night on a lonely part of the road. That's why he's got no alibi."
"Did no one see him or talk to him?" Betty's voice was low and strained.