"Well?" muttered Brent. "I'm not so far off that stage myself. Why didn't he speak out, and be done with it. There's been more in that love affair than I guessed at, Tansley—that's where it is! The woman's anxious enough anyway—look at her!"
Mrs. Saumarez had come back into court. She was pale enough and eager enough—and it seemed to Brent that she was almost holding her breath as the old Coroner, in his slow, carefully-measured accents and phrases, went on piling up the damning conclusions that might be drawn against Wellesley.
"You must not allow yourselves to forget, gentlemen," he was saying, "that Dr. Wellesley's assertion that he was busy with a caller during the fateful nineteen minutes is wholly uncorroborated. There are several—four or five, I think—domestic servants in his establishment, and there was also his assistant in the house, and there were patients going in and out of the surgery, but no one has been brought forward to prove that he was engaged with a visitor in his drawing-room. Now you are only concerned with the evidence that has been put before you, and I am bound to tell you that there is no evidence that Dr. Wellesley had any caller——"
A woman's voice suddenly rang out, clear and sharp, from a point of the audience immediately facing the Coroner.
"He had! I was the caller!"
In the excitement of the moment Tansley sprang to his feet, stared, sank back again.
"Good God!" he exclaimed. "Mrs. Mallett! Who'd have thought it!"
Brent, too, got up and looked. He saw a handsome, determined-looking woman standing amidst the closely-packed spectators. Mallett sat by her side; he was evidently struck dumb with sudden amazement and was staring open-mouthed at her; on the other side, two or three men and women, evidently friends, were expostulating with the interrupter. But Mrs. Mallett was oblivious of her husband's wonder and her friends' entreaties; confronting the Coroner she spoke again.
"Mr. Seagrave, I am the person who called on Dr. Wellesley!" she said in a loud, clear voice. "I was there all the time you're discussing, and if you'll let me give evidence you shall have it on my oath. I am not going to sit here and hear an innocent man traduced for lack of a word of mine."
The Coroner, who looked none too well pleased at this interruption, motioned Mrs. Mallett to come forward. He waved aside impatiently a protest from Wellesley, who seemed to be begging this voluntary witness to go back to her seat and say nothing, and, as Mrs. Mallett entered the witness-box, turned to Meeking.