"I didn't,"—Mr. Deutch burst forth—"keep 'em quiet any because she was there. She wouldn't have touched such doings, not with the sole of her foot. But I didn't want the gentleman she was engaged to should be put out of the house when I was running it, after her recommending it to him, on my account!" His eyes and his voice were full of exasperated tears. "He'd have told her one lie and yet another and another, and she'd have believed him, and he'd have wanted her to fight me. Not that she would. But he was fierce against her friends, any of 'em. And I didn't want she should have no more trouble than what she had with him already."
"Very kind of you. Nature made you for a squire of dames, Mr. Deutch. Miss Hope, now,—you are a particularly old friend of hers, I believe. And I understand you would do a great deal for her."
"I'd do anything at all for her."
"I see." All that was crouching in the coroner coiled and sprang. "Even to committing perjury for her, Mr. Deutch. Even to concealing a murder for her sake?—Silence!" he commanded Christina's friends.
In the sudden deathly stillness Deutch lifted his head. He looked at the coroner with the eyes of a lion, and in a firm voice he replied, "Say, when you speak like that about a lady, Mr. Coroner, you want to look out you don't go a little too far."
"I am about to call a witness," said the coroner, with his cold laugh, "who will go even farther. Joseph Patrick, please!"
Joe Patrick was the night-elevator boy.
People stared about them. No witness. The coroner's man came forward, saying something about "telephoned—accident—get here shortly."
"See that he does,—The day-elevator boy in court!"
Disappointment reigned. After the glorious baiting of one whose race went so long a way to make him fair game, almost anything would have been an anti-climax. There now advanced for their delectation a slim, blond, anemic, peevish youth, feeble yet cocky, almost as much like a faded flower from a somewhat degenerated stalk as if he had been nipping down Fifth Avenue under a silk hat, and whose name of Willie Clarence Dodd proclaimed him of the purest Christian blood. Yet the stare of the assembly wandered from him, passed, grinning, where Deutch sat with hanging head, and settled down to feed upon the pallor of Christina's cheek. Herrick rose suddenly, displacing, as it were, a great deal of atmosphere with his large person, and stalking across the room, pulled up a chair to Deutch's side. If he had clasped and held that plump, that trembling hand, his intention could not have been more obvious. Christina turned her head a little and, with no change of expression, looked at him for a moment. Then she turned back again to Willie Clarence Dodd. That gentleman, ogling her with a canny glance, affably tipped his hat to her, and she bowed to him with utter gravity.