“You mean that I am telling a lie?”
“Oh, you lawyers doubtless have a better-tasting word for it. You would call it, say, a ‘professional expedient.’”
She was still not sufficiently recovered from her astonishment to be angry. Besides, she felt herself by an unexpected turn put in the wrong regarding Bruce.
“What I have said to you is the absolute truth,” she declared. “Here is the situation—believe me or not, just as you please. I ask you, for the moment, to accept the proposition that my father is the victim of a plot to steal the water-works, and then see how everything fits in with that theory. And bear in mind, as an item worth considering, my father’s long and honourable career—never a dishonouring word against him till this charge came.” And she went on and outlined, more fully than on yesterday before her father, the reasoning that had led her to her conclusion. “Now, does not that sound possible?” she demanded.
He had watched her with keen, half-closed eyes.
“H’m. You reason well,” he conceded.
“That’s a lawyer’s business,” she retorted. “So much for theory. Now for facts.” And she continued and gave him her experience of half an hour before with Blake, the editor’s boring gaze fixed on her all the while. “Now I ask you this question: Is it likely that even a poor water system could fail so quickly and so completely as ours has done, unless some powerful person was secretly working to make it fail? Do you not see it never could? We all would have seen it, but we’ve all been too busy, too blind, and thought too well of our town, to suspect such a thing.”
His eyes were still boring into her.
“But how about Doctor Sherman?” he asked.
“I believe that Doctor Sherman is an innocent tool of the conspiracy, just as my father is its innocent victim,” she answered promptly.