"Yes. What did you think you'd do after you'd overtaken her?"
"Persuade her to go back home with me. I wanted to save her from doing anything foolish—anything like that, you know."
"But, from what you've told us here this morning, it seems you never had much influence on her behaviour. Isn't that true?"
"I suppose it is.—But," Russell added eagerly, "I can prove I had no idea of hurting her, if that's what you're hinting at. I can prove I never struck her. At twenty minutes past eleven last night I was four miles from here. Mr. Otis, a Washington commission merchant, picked me up in his automobile, six miles outside of Washington and took me into town. I couldn't have made that four miles on foot, no matter how I ran, in approximately fifteen or twenty minutes.
"It's been proved that she was struck down after eleven anyway.—You said the condition of the body showed that, doctor.—You see, I would have had to make the four miles in less than twenty minutes—an impossibility. You see?"
His eagerness to win their confidence put a disagreeable note, almost a whimper, into his voice. It grated on Dr. Garnet.
It affected Hastings more definitely.
"Now," he decided, "he's lying—about something. But what?" He noted a change in Russell's face, a suggestion of craftiness, the merest shadow of slyness over his general attitude of anxiety. And yet, this part of his story seemed straight enough.
Dr. Garnet's next question brought out the fact that it would be corroborated.