Shagarach waved her with courtesy to the nonplussed though apparently still obstinate district attorney. A long conference followed among the prosecuting lawyers, while Emily heaved a sigh of relief.
Over in his front seat Ecks was gazing at Shagarach, as if trying to pierce the great brow, not opened showily, but masked, as it were, by the loose-falling hair. The marvelous skill of his tactics—first, the breaking down of Serena's story through its intrinsic discrepancies, then the building up from her own lips of a hypothetical case in the jurors' minds—all without deviating a hair line from true courtesy and delicacy of treatment—sank deeply into the novelist's heart. He did not reply to Wye's comment on the underplot.
"Incarnate self-control!" he muttered to himself.
But alas for poor Saul Aronson! It was bad enough to be compelled to flee from suspicion post haste through the gateway of public ridicule. But to realize at last that Serena was human and no angel—capable of pique, brusqueness and tears—capable even of resisting Shagarach! The scales of illusion fell from his eyes and he hung his head, a chastened youth.
"The redirect is deferred," said Bigelow, and Serena, after returning the fan to Emily, stepped softly out. Her footfalls barely broke the dead silence as she picked her way through the crowd.
Aronson lifted his eyes to her face. What imperfections he noted now! The eyebrows too level, the rosebud mouth too small and the cheekbones unmistakably present, even if barely breaking the curve. It was fated so. Doubtless in time he would follow old Abraham Barentzen's counsel and take some comely daughter of Israel to wife, well-dowered, a good housekeeper, and free from tittle-tattle. But never again would his naive heart palpitate with such virginal ecstasy as when he first gazed through the rose-misted spectacles of love on that sweetly imperfect gentile maiden.
"We shall now offer a mass of evidence," said the district attorney, "tending to prove the crucial point of exclusive opportunity."
Seven witnesses took the box, one after another, and in response to Badger's questions, swore that they were neighbors of the Arnolds, were wide-awake and observant about the time of the fire, but saw no person coming out of the house either in front or rear. The evidence was negative, but cumulatively it produced its effect, leading the minds of the jury away from Serena Lamb and her legend to the real core of the puzzle. By the time the last witness on this point arrived, a cordon of watchers, completely environing the house, had been drawn around it by the government, and it seemed impossible that any one could have slipped through unobserved.