"Didn't this picture of the study, which you have quoted, come in as part of his description of a law case?"
"Why, yes; he began talking about the Floyd case."
"In which he was deeply interested at that time, as my assistant. That, however, he did not make clear to you?"
"No."
"Can you swear that this whole picture of a Sunday-night entrance and experiment on the safe was not an imaginary one—a piece of fiction, invented and vividly told in the first person to illustrate what Robert Floyd might easily have done if he had desired to destroy the will, but what——"
Shagarach inclined slightly toward the jury, "but what he evidently did not do?"
"Perhaps. Truly I couldn't catch half of what he was saying when he began to talk rapidly."
"I myself am a locksmith. He could come and give me money. We go Sunday night. Nobody home. House all still. I get down on my knees. File a little. Drill. Somebody come. I go away. Come again. Try again."
Serena smiled a smile that sent waves of sunshine through the room. Shagarach had not once descended to mimicry of his assistant's dialect. But the broken fragments of speech, the confused arrangement, seemed to call before Serena's eye an amusing picture of her lovelorn swain's incoherence.
"Perhaps I was altogether mistaken," she volunteered.