At last the judge comes up and the officials stream in.
“Call Jean Bower!”
What all the people there have been waiting for with almost savage longing is now about to take place, and every eye in Court save the prisoner’s fastens on Jean Bower.
The slight girlish figure ascends the steps into the witness-box. She is painfully pale—her pallor enhanced by her plain black coat and skirt. Yet, strange to say, Jean Bower does not make a pleasant impression. She is too quiet, too self-possessed. It is difficult to visualize her as the heroine of a criminal love drama.
After she has been sworn, Sir Almeric takes her through the story which is now almost tiresomely familiar to most of those present. She sticks firmly to the unlikely tale that till the return of Henry Garlett, four months after his wife’s death, he and she had been on terms of formal acquaintance—nothing more.
And then at last there comes the thrill for which all these men and women who crowd the public galleries to suffocation have been waiting.
“I suppose I may assume that after his return, this last autumn, you became deeply attached to Mr. Garlett?”
There follows a long pause—twice Jean Bower opens her pale lips, but no answer comes from them. Then, slowly, she bends her head.
“Do you still love him?”
The question is asked in a hard, unemotional voice. But it seems to galvanize the witness into eager, passionate, palpitating life.