The witness fluttered her fan nervously and her lips were quivering. She looked down.
"Sunday evening, you said. You are probably not aware that Prof. Arnold read in his own library every Sunday evening up to the time of his death?"
Serena began to cry. Instantly the tension of the audience was relaxed and comments passed to and fro.
"She belongs to the romantic school of statisticians," whispered Wye. Ecks responded with a cartoon of "Miss Meekness, making a slip of the decimal point."
"Religious mania; hysterical mendacity," a doctor diagnosed it, with a pompous frown.
"Little minx had a craving for notoriety," said a woman, elderly, unmarried and plain.
"I should say it illustrates the pernicious effect of novel reading on a rustic brain," murmured a clerical personage, clearing his throat before he delivered himself.
Suddenly Shagarach's insistence left him. His voice softened. With his very first question, the distressed look, half of reproach, half of sympathy, toward Serena, cleared away from Aronson's face.
"Wasn't Mr. Aronson agitated on that evening, Miss Lamb?"
She blushed amid her tears and her answer was less defiant.