He thought he was on the right track at last.
“No,” she said again, “I was never in France, I was in a Manchester hospital in the later part of the war. I became secretary to the Etna China Company last April, and as I have not resigned my post, I am that now.”
She spoke with a certain simple directness.
“Then you were secretary to Mr. Garlett’s company, and you also took care of his wife?” said the famous advocate, again with a curious, not very pleasant, smile on his face.
“You are confusing me with Miss Cheale, who was Mrs. Garlett’s housekeeper and companion,” said Jean.
There had now come over her a terrible feeling of anxious despondency, and of bitter, bitter disappointment. She had expected the great man—he had been described to her as a very great man by Mr. Toogood—to have the whole story at his fingers’ ends, and to be, even in everyday life, an ardent, as well as an eloquent, believer in his client’s innocence.
Something of what was passing in her mind became apparent to Sir Harold Anstey, and he felt sharply vexed with himself. Vexed for having got the threads of the story so wrong, and vexed, too, that he had broken through his rule of never seeing, excepting at his own request, any one connected with a forthcoming case.
In his happy, prosperous everyday life Sir Harold rarely came across any girls who seemed to him as prudish as the girl now sitting facing him. Besides, with regard to this girl, who had actually driven a man to commit murder for love of her, such a pose was not only absurd, but very hypocritical.
Still, as he had been foolish enough to see her, he told himself that he might as well make the best of it, and improve his own chances of winning what he was beginning to see was going to be a very important case.
His manner changed; it became, if not exactly more pleasant, then shrewd and businesslike—what his visitor vaguely described to herself as “sensible.”