Here the district attorney interrupted. "We object. The suspicions of another person are irrelevant, incompetent, and have nothing to do with the case."
"Sustained," the judge decreed. "Stick to the facts, Mr. Dayton."
"During those three months, Miss Morgan, has Richard Glover made an effort to induce you to marry him?"
Her reply was given in a very low voice, but Dayton was sure that the jury caught it and he did not ask her to repeat. It was evident that the audience heard it, too, for another murmur rose and trailed off into silence before the lawyer went on. "Is it true that you were the one who discovered the clue which led you and your brother to seek the services of Mr. Jarvis on this case?"
She acknowledged it with a single word.
"And what was that clue?"
The gloved fingers closed a little closer over the arm of the chair. And then followed a story which caused Roger Kenwick to tear his gaze away from the fantastic palm-trees and fix it upon Richard Glover's face. There was no resentment in his eyes, but only the dawning of a great light. Granville Jarvis, watching him as a physician might watch beside the bedside of an unconscious patient, knew by the leaping flame in those somber eyes that the last lap of the long journey had been covered, and that Roger Kenwick's memory had come home to him. But if that knowledge brought him a scientist's satisfaction, he gave no sign of it. After that one intent moment, his eyes returned to the witness-stand and fixed themselves upon Marcreta Morgan's face. Dayton was proceeding relentlessly.
"If you knew from the first that Richard Glover had stolen this story which he read to you as his own, why didn't you relate the circumstance to Mr. Kenwick when you saw him on the night that he was arrested for murder?"
The reply came haltingly, as though the witness were feeling her way over uneven ground. "My brother and I had consulted Mr. Jarvis about that and he had advised against it. He didn't wish to arouse any suspicions in—in the prisoner's mind just then. And—well, you see, Mr. Kenwick and I had not seen each other since his—illness and during that first meeting we both avoided everything connected with—with the tragedy as much as possible. Of course if we had known that this charge of—of crime was to be preferred against him, I suppose we would have acted differently."
This was no carefully rehearsed response, but nothing that she could have said would have disclosed more clearly the inside workings of the opposition's conspiracy. The web that had been woven around the prisoner had enmeshed with him every one who had ever been intimately associated with his past.