"You were requested to state any conversation relevant to this cause which you had with the accused while in prison. You answered with a few meaningless words pronounced in sleep. I confess the relevance of all this later testimony escapes me," said Shagarach.
"The next witness, Miss Lamb," answered the district attorney, "will make the connection of all these threads of testimony plain."
"Do you know Mr. Aronson, the piano dealer?" asked Shagarach of the witness.
"By sight."
McCausland, though he kept his own identity as hidden as possible, knew the whole city by sight.
"Is it not possible to construe this note on the postal card as referring to the refractory lock of Miss Barlow's piano, which the accused had recently purchased for her as a birthday present?"
"Out of the $309 he earned?" asked McCausland.
"That and the lifelong income he has enjoyed from his mother's property," said Shagarach. Whereupon McCausland, Bigelow and the whole court-room stared, and even Chief Justice Playfair's trained eyebrow was perceptibly lifted.
"Miss Serena Lamb," called the district attorney. How Aronson blushed and fidgeted when his idol, with eyes downcast in virgin shyness, tripped in from the corridor at a constable's beck and mounted the stand!
"Glory alleluia!" she said, with her right hand raised, when the clerk had repeated the formula of the oath.