“There was no harm in it,” shrieked Afy, with a catching sob of temper. “If I chose to live in London, and he chose to make a morning call upon me, now and then, as an old friend, what’s that to anybody? Where was the harm, I ask?”
“Certainly—where was the harm? I am not insinuating any,” returned Lawyer Ball, with a wink of the eye furthest from the witness and the bench. “And, during the time that—that he was making these little morning calls upon you, did you know him to be Levison?”
“Yes. I knew him to be Captain Levison then.”
“Did he ever tell you why he had assumed the name of Thorn?”
“Only for a whim, he said. The day he spoke to me in the pastrycook’s shop at Swainson, something came over him, in the spur of the moment, not to give his right name, so he gave the first that came into his head. He never thought to retain it, or that other people would hear of him by it.”
“I dare say not,” laconically spoke Lawyer Ball. “Well, Miss Afy, I believe that is all for the present. I want Ebenezer James in again,” he whispered to an officer of the justice-room, as the witness retired.
Ebenezer James reappeared and took Afy’s place.
“You informed their worships, just now, that you had met Thorn in London, some eighteen months subsequent to the murder,” began Lawyer Ball, launching another of his shafts. “This must have been during the period of Afy Hallijohn’s sojourn with him. Did you also see her?”
Mr. Ebenezer opened his eyes. He knew nothing of the evidence just given by Afy, and wondered how on earth it had come out—that she had been with Thorn at all. He had never betrayed it.
“Afy?” stammered he.