Mr. Bates first of all suggested, as it were, casually, that the woman was more than one-and-twenty. The doctor did not think it possible. Everything went to show that she was not. Then, after some fencing, he tried to induce the doctor to admit that she might have been strangled after she had fallen from the train. That she might have fallen from the train by accident. Been stupefied by the fall, and, on recovering from her stupor, that some one might have come along and strangled her. The doctor would have none of it, He deemed the thing incredible. Mr. Bates hammered away, but the doctor held his own.
Tommy was done!
He was done still more when it came to the second doctor's turn. He was a Dr. Braithwaite, a great swell from London. He had examined the body at East Grinstead. He corroborated all that Dr. Gresham had had to say, putting things, if anything, a little stronger against poor Tommy. He declined to move a hair's-breadth from his fixed conviction that the woman had been strangled--in the train.
When he left the box every creature in court was aware that, unless something amounting almost to a miracle intervened, Tommy's fate was sealed.
Sir Haselton Jardine, half rising from his seat, announced that that was the case for the Crown.
CHAPTER XXXII.
[MRS. CARRUTH REMOVES HER VEIL.]
After luncheon came the speeches.
Sir Haselton Jardine's was as deadly as it very well could have been. He was not a bit of an orator. He reminded one of an automatic figure as much as anything, as if he had been wound up to go. He went quietly on, in the same placid, passionless sort of whisper, but as clear as a bell. One never lost a syllable he uttered. He never faltered or stumbled. The words, as they flowed from him, were exactly adapted to the meaning they were intended to convey. He fitted them together with the dexterity of an artist in mosaic.
One began almost to feel that one was listening to the voice of doom.