The Bellamy Trial

by

Frances Noyes Hart

Garden City, New York

Doubleday, Page & Company

Copyright, 1927, Frances Noyes Hart

Contents

To
my favourite lawyer

Edward Henry Hart

The Bellamy Trial

The Judge

Anthony Bristed Carver

The Defendants

Susan Ives

Stephen Bellamy

Chapter I

The red-headed girl sank into the seat in the middle of the first row with a gasp of relief. Sixth seat from the aisle—yes, that was right; the label on the arm of the golden-oak chair stared up at her reassuringly. Row A, seat 15, Philadelphia Planet. The ones on either side of her were empty. Well, it was a relief to know that there were four feet of space left unoccupied in Redfield, even if only temporarily. She was still shaken into breathless stupor by the pandemonium in the corridors outside—the rattling of regiments of typewriters, of armies of tickers, the shouts of infuriated denizens of telephone booths, the hurrying, frantic faces of officials, the scurrying and scampering of dozens of rusty-haired freckled-faced insubordinate small boys, whose olive-drab messenger uniforms alone saved them from extermination; the newspaper men—you could spot them at once, looking exhausted and alert and elaborately bored; the newspaper women, keen and purposeful and diverted; and above and around and below all these licensed inhabitants, the crowd—a vast, jostling, lunging beast, with one supreme motive galvanizing it to action—an immense, a devouring curiosity that sent it surging time and time again against the closed glass doors with their blue-coated guardians, fragile barriers between it and the consummation of its desire. For just beyond those doors lay the arena where the beast might slake its hunger at will, and it was not taking its frustration of that privilege amiably.

The red-headed girl set her little black-feathered hat straight with unsteady fingers. She wasn’t going to forget that crowd in a hurry. It had growled at her—actually growled—when she’d fought her way through it, armed with the magic of the little blue ticket that spelled open sesame as well as press section. Who could have believed that even curiosity would turn nice old gray-headed ladies and mild-looking gentlemen with brown moustaches and fat matrons with leather bags and thin flappers with batik scarfs into one huge ravenous beast? She panted again, reminiscently, at the thought of the way they’d shoved and squashed and kneaded—and then settled down to gratified inspection.

So this was a courtroom!

Not a very large or very impressive room, looked at from any angle. It might hold three hundred people at a pinch, and there were, conservatively, about three thousand crowding the corridors and walking the streets of Redfield in their efforts to expand its limits. Fan-shaped, with nine rows of the golden-oak seats packed with grimly triumphant humanity, the first three neatly tagged with the little white labels that metamorphosed them into the press section. Golden-oak panelling half-way up the walls, and then whitewashed plaster—rather dingy, smoky plaster, its defects relentlessly revealed by the pale autumnal sunshine flooding in through the great windows and the dome of many-coloured glass, lavish and heartening enough to compensate for much of the grimness and the grime.

Near enough for the red-headed girl to touch was a low rail, and beyond that rail a little empty space, like a stage—empty of actors, but cluttered with chairs and tables. At the back was a small platform with a great high-backed black leather chair, and a still smaller platform on a slightly lower level, with a rail about it and a much more uncomfortable-looking chair. The judge’s seat, the witness box—she gave a little sigh of pure uncontrollable excitement, and a voice next to her said affably:

“Hi! Greetings, stranger, or hail, friend, as the case may be. Can I get by you into the next seat without damaging you and those feet of yours materially?”

The red-headed girl scrambled guiltily to the offending feet, unobtrusive enough in themselves, but most obtrusively extended across the narrow passage, and turned a flushed and anxious countenance on her cheerful critic, now engaged in folding himself competently into the exiguous space provided by the golden-oak chair. A tall lanky young man, with a straight nose, mouse-coloured hair, shrewd gray eyes, and an expression that was intended to be that of a hard-boiled cynic, and that worked all right unless he grinned. He wore a shabby tweed suit, a polka-dotted tie, had three very sharp pencils, and a good-sized stack of telegraph blanks clasped to his heart. Obviously a reporter—a real reporter. The red-headed girl attempted to conceal her gold pencil and leather-bound notebook, smiling tentatively and ingratiatingly.

“Covering it for a New York paper?” inquired the Olympian one graciously.

“No,” said the red-headed girl humbly; “a Philadelphia one—the Philadelphia Planet. Is yours New York?”

“M’m—h’m—Sphere. Doing colour stuff?”

“Oh, I hope so,” replied the red-headed girl so fervently that the reporter looked somewhat startled. “You see, I don’t know whether it will have colour or not. I’m not exactly a regular reporter.”

“Oh, you aren’t, aren’t you? Well, if it’s no secret, just exactly what are you? A finger-print expert?”

“I’m a—a writer,” said the red-headed girl, looking unusually small and dignified. “This is my first as—assignment.” It was frightful to stammer just when you particularly wanted not to.

The real reporter eyed her severely. “A writer, hey? A real, honest-to-goodness, walking-around writer, with a fountain pen and a great big vocabulary and a world of promise and everything? Well, I’ll bet you a hot dog to a soup plate of fresh caviar that about four days from now you’ll be parading through these marble halls telling the cockeyed world that you’re a journalist.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t dare. Do all of you call yourselves journalists?”

The reporter looked as though he were about to suffocate. “Get this,” he said impressively: “The day that you hear me call myself a journalist you have my full and free permission to call me a —— Well, no, on second thought, a lady couldn’t. But if you ever call me a journalist, smile. And if you solemnly swear never to call yourself one I’ll show you the ropes a bit, because you’re a poor ignorant little writing critter that doesn’t know any better than to come to a murder trial—and besides that you have red hair. Want to know anything?”

“Oh,” cried the red-headed girl, “I didn’t know that anyone so horrid could be so nice. I want to know everything. Let’s begin at the beginning.”

“Well, in case you don’t know where you are, this is the courtroom of Redfield, county seat of Bellechester, twenty-five miles from the great metropolis of New York. And in case you’d like to know what it’s all about, it’s the greatest murder trial of the century—about every two years another one of ’em comes along. This particular one is the trial of the People versus Susan Ives and Stephen Bellamy for the wilful, deliberate, and malicious murder of Madeleine Bellamy.”

“A murder trial,” said the red-headed girl softly. “Well, I should think that ought to be about the most tremendous thing in the world.”

“Oh, you do, do you?” remarked the reporter, and for a moment it was no effort at all for him to look cynical. “Well, I’ll have you called at about seven to-morrow morning, though it’s a pity ever to wake anyone up that can have such beautiful dreams as that. The most tremendous thing in the world, says she. Well, well, well!”

The red-headed girl eyed him belligerently. “Well, yourself! Perhaps you’ll be good enough to tell me what’s more tremendous than murder.”

“Oh, you tell me!” urged the reporter persuasively.

“All right, I’ll tell you that the only story that you’re going to be able to interest every human being in, from the President of the United States to the gentleman who takes away the ashes, is a good murder story. It’s the one universal solvent. The old lady from Dubuque will be at it the first thing in the morning, and the young lady from Park Avenue will be at it the last thing at night. And if it’s a love story too, you’re lucky, because then you’ve got the combination that every really great writer that ever lived has picked out to wring hearts and freeze the marrow in posterity’s bones.”

“Oh, come! Aren’t you getting just a dash over-wrought? Every great writer? What about Wordsworth?”

“Oh, pooh!” said the red-headed girl fiercely. “Wordsworth! What about Sophocles and Euripides and Shakespeare and Browning? Do you know what ‘The Ring and the Book’ is? It’s a murder trial! What’s ‘Othello’ but a murder story? What’s ‘Hamlet’ but five murder stories? What’s ‘Macbeth’? Or ‘The Cenci’? Or ‘Lamia’? Or ‘Crime and Punishment’? Or ‘Carmen’? Or——”

“I give up,” said the reporter firmly—“or, no, wait a moment—can it be that they are murder stories? Quite a little reader in your quiet way, aren’t you?”

The red-headed girl ignored him sternly. “And do you want me to tell you why it’s the most enthralling and absorbing theme in the world? Do you?”

“No,” replied the reporter hastily. “Yes—or how shall I put it? Yes and no, let’s say.”

“It’s because it’s real,” said the red-headed girl, with a sudden startling gravity. “It’s the only thing that’s absolutely real in the world, I think. Something that makes you reckless enough not to care a tinker’s dam for your own life or another’s—that’s something to think about, isn’t it?”

“Well, yes,” said the reporter slowly. “Now that you put it that way, that’s something to think about.”

“It’s good for us, too,” said the girl, “We’re all so everlastingly canny and competent and sophisticated these days, going mechanically through a mechanical world, sharpening up our little emotions, tuning up our little sensations—and suddenly there’s a cry of ‘Murder!’ in the streets, and we stop and look back, shuddering, over our shoulder—and across us falls the shadow of a savage with a bloodstained club, and we know that it’s good and dangerous and beautiful to be alive.”

“I rather get you,” said the reporter thoughtfully. “And, strangely enough, there’s just a dash in what you say. It’s the same nice, creepy, luxurious feeling that you get when you pull up closer to a good roaring fire with carpet slippers on your feet and a glass of something hot and sweet in your hand and listen to the wind yowling outside and see the rain on the black windowpanes. Nothing in the world to make you feel warm and safe and sheltered and cozy like a good storm or a good murder—what?”

“Nothing in the world,” agreed the red-headed girl; and she added pensively, “It’s always interested me more than anything else.”

“Has it indeed? Well, don’t let it get you. I’d just keep it as a hobby if I were you. At your present gait you’re going to make some fellow an awfully happy widow one of these days. Are you a good marksman?”

“You think that murder’s frightfully amusing, don’t you?” The red-headed girl’s soft voice had a sudden edge to it.

The real reporter’s face changed abruptly. “No, I don’t,” he said shortly. “I think it’s rotten—a dirty, bloody, beastly business that used to keep me awake nights until I grew a shell over my skin and acquired a fairly workable sense of humour to use on all these clowns called human beings. Of course, I’m one of them myself, but I don’t boast about it. And if you’re suffering from the illusion that nothing shocks me, I’ll tell you right now that it shocks me any amount that a scrap of a thing like you, with all that perfectly good red hair and a rather nice arrangement in dimples, should be practically climbing over that rail in your frenzy to find out what it’s all about.”

“I think that men are the most amusing race in the world,” murmured the red-headed girl. “And I think that it’s awfully appealing of you to be shocked. But, you see, my grandfather—who was as stern and Scotch and hidebound as anyone that ever breathed—told me when I was fourteen years old that a great murder trial was the most superbly dramatic spectacle that the world afforded. And he ought to have known what he was talking about—he was one of the greatest judges that ever lived.”

“Well, maybe they were in his day. And you said Scotch, didn’t you? Oh, well, they do it better over there. England, too—bunches of flowers on the clerks’ tables and wigs on the judges’ heads, and plenty of scarlet and gold, and all the great lawyers in the land taking a whack at it, and never a cross word out of one of them——”

“He used to say that is was like a hunt,” interrupted the red-headed girl firmly, “with the judge as master of the hounds and the lawyers as the hounds, baying as they ran hot on the scent, and all the rest of us galloping hard at their heels—jury, spectators, public.”

“Sure,” said the reporter grimly. “With the quarry waiting, bound and shackled and gagged till they catch up with him and tear him to pieces—it’s a great hunt all right, all right!”

“It’s not a human being that they’re hunting, idiot—it’s truth.”

“Truth!” The reporter’s laugh was loud and long and free enough to cause a dozen heads to turn. “Oh, what you’re going to learn before you get out of here! A hunt for truth, is it? Well, now, you get this straight: If that’s what you’re expecting to find here, you’ll save yourself a whole lot of bad minutes by taking the next train back to Philadelphia. Truth! I’m not running down murder trials from the point of view of interest, you understand. A really good one furnishes all the best points of a first-class dog fight and a highly superior cross-word puzzle, and that ought to be enough excitement for anyone. But if you think that the opposing counsel are honestly in pursuit of enlightenment——”

A clear high voice cut through the rustle and clatter like a knife.

“His Honour! His Honour the Court!” There was a mighty rustle of upheaval.

“Who’s that?” inquired a breathless voice at the reporter’s shoulder.

“That’s the tallest and nicest court crier in the United States of America. Name’s Ben Potts. Best falsetto voice outside the Russian Orthodox Church. Kindly notice the central hair part and spit curls. And here we have none other than His Honour himself, Judge Anthony Bristed Carver.”

“Hear ye! Hear ye! Hear ye!” chanted the court crier. “All those having business before this honourable court draw near, give your attention and you shall be heard!”

The tall figure in flowing black moved deliberately toward the chair on the dais, which immediately assumed the aspect of a throne. Judge Carver’s sleek iron-gray head and aquiline face were an adornment to any courtroom. He swept a pair of brilliant deep-set eyes over the room, seated himself, and reached for the gavel in one motion.

“And he’ll use it, too, believe you me,” murmured the reporter with conviction. “Sternest old guy on the bench.”

“Where are the prisoners—where do they come from?”

“The defendants, as they whimsically prefer to be called for the time being, come through that little door to the left of the judge’s room; that enormous red-faced, sandy-haired old duffer talking to the thin young man in the tortoise-shell glasses is Mrs. Ives’s counsel, Mr. Dudley Lambert; the begoggled one is Mr. Bellamy’s counsel, Harrison Clark.”

“Where’s the prosecutor?”

“Oh, well, Mr. Farr is liable to appear almost anywhere, like Mephistopheles in Faust or that baby that so obligingly came out of the everywhere into the here. He’s all for the unexpected— Ah, what did I tell you? There he is now, conferring with the judge and the defense counsel.”

The red-headed girl leaned forward eagerly. The slender individual, leaning with rather studied ease against the railing that hedged in the majesty of the law, suggested a curious cross between a promising light of Tammany Hall and the youngest and handsomest of the Spanish Inquisitioners. Black hair that deserved the qualification of raven, a pale regular face that missed distinction by a destructive quarter of an inch, narrow blue eyes back of which stirred some restless fire, long slim hands—what was there about him that wasn’t just right? Perhaps that dark coat fitted him just a shade too well, or that heavily brocaded tie in peacock blue— Well, at any rate, his slim elegance certainly made Lambert look like an awkward, cross, red-faced baby, for all his thatch of graying hair.

“Here they come!” Even the reporter’s level, mocking voice was a trifle tense.

The little door to the left of the judge opened and two people came in, as leisurely and tranquilly as though they were advancing toward easy chairs and a tea table before an open fire. A slight figure in a tan tweed suit, with a soft copper silk handkerchief at her throat and a little felt hat of the same colour pulled down over two wings of pale gold hair, level hazel eyes under level dark brows, and a beautiful mouth, steady-lipped, generous, sensitive—the most beautiful mouth, thought the red-headed girl, that she had ever seen. She crossed the short distance between the door and the chair beside which stood Mr. Lambert with a light, boyish swing. She looked rather like a boy—a gallant, proud little boy, striding forward to receive the victor’s laurels. Did murderesses walk like that?

Behind her came Stephen Bellamy, the crape band on his dark coat appallingly conspicuous; only a few inches taller than Sue Ives, with dark hair lightly silvered, and a charming, sensitive, olive-skinned face. As they seated themselves, he flashed the briefest of smiles at his companion—a grave, consoling smile, singularly sweet—then turned an attentive countenance to the judge. Did a murderer smile like that?

The red-headed girl sat staring at them blankly.

“Oh, Lord!” moaned the reporter at her side. “Why did that old jackass Lambert let her come in here in that rig? If he had the sense that God gives a dead duck he’d know that she ought to be wearing something black and frilly and pitiful instead of stamping around in brown leather Oxfords as though she were headed straight for the first tee instead of the electric chair.”

“Oh, don’t!” The red-headed girl’s voice was passionate in its protest. “You don’t know what you’re talking about. Look, what are they doing now? What’s that wheel?”

“That’s for choosing the jury; it looks as though they were going to start right now. Yes, they’re off; that’s the sheriff spinning the wheel. He calls the names——”

“Timothy Forbes!”

A stocky man with a small shrewd eye and a reddish moustache wormed his way forward.

“Number 1! Take your seat in the box.”

“Will it take long?” asked the red-headed girl.

“Alexander Petty!”

“Not at this rate,” replied the reporter, watching the progress toward the jury box of a tow-headed little man with steel-bowed spectacles and a suit a little shiny at the elbows.

“This is going to be just as rapid as the law allows, I understand. Both sides are rarin’ to go, and they’re not liable to touch their peremptory challenges; and they’re not likely to challenge for cause, either, unless it’s a darned good cause.”

“Eliphalet Slocum!”

A keen-faced elderly man with a mouth like a steel trap joined the men in the box.

“It’s a special panel that they’re choosing from,” explained the reporter, lowering his voice cautiously as Judge Carver glanced ominously in his direction. “Redfield’s pretty up and coming for a place of its size. All the obviously undesirables are weeded out, so it saves an enormous amount of time.”

“Cæsar Smith!”

Mr. Smith advanced at a trot, his round, amiable countenance beamingly exposing three gold teeth to the pleased spectators.

“Robert Angostini.”

A dark and dapper individual with a silky black moustache slipped quietly by Mr. Smith.

“Number 5, take your place in the box. . . . George Hobart.”

An amiable-looking youth in a brown Norfolk jacket advanced briskly.

“Who’s that coming in now?” inquired the red-headed girl in a stealthy whisper.

“Where?”

“In the witnesses’ seats—over in the corner by the window. The tall man with the darling little old lady.”

The reporter turned his head, his boredom lit by a transient gleam of interest. “That? That’s Pat Ives and his mother. She’s been subpœnaed by the state as a witness—God knows what for.”

“I love them when they wear bonnets,” said the red-headed girl. “What’s he like?”

“Pat? Well, take a good look at him; that’s what he’s like.”

The red-headed girl obediently took a good look. Black hair, blue eyes, black with pain, set in a haggard, beautiful young face that looked white to the bone, a reckless mouth set in a line of desperation.

“He doesn’t look very contented,” she commented mildly.

“And his looks don’t belie him,” the reporter assured her drily. “Young Mr. Ives belongs to the romantic school—you know—the guardsman, the troubadour, the rover, and the lover; the duel by candlelight, the rose in the moonlight, the dice, the devil and boots, saddle, to horse and away. The type that muffs it when he’s thrown into a show that deals in the crude realism of spilled kerosene and bloody rags and an Italian labourer’s stuffy little front parlour. Mix him up with that and he gets shadows under his eyes and three degrees of fever and bad dreams. Also, he gets a little irritable with reporters.”

“Did you interview him?” inquired the red-headed girl in awe-stricken tones.

“Well, that’s a nice way of putting it,” said the reporter thoughtfully. “I went around to the Ives’ house with one or two other scientific spirits on the night after Sue Ives and Bellamy were arrested—June twenty-first, if my memory serves me. We rang the doorbell none too optimistically, and the door opened so suddenly that we practically fell flat on our faces in the front hall. There stood the debonair Mr. Ives, in his shirt sleeves, with as unattractive a look on his face as I’ve ever seen in my life.

“ ‘Come right in, gentlemen,’ says he, and he made that sound unattractive too. ‘I’m not mistaken, am I? It’s the gentlemen of the press that I’m addressing?’ We allowed without too much enthusiasm that such was indeed the case, and in we came. ‘Let’s get right down to business,’ he said. ‘None of this absurd delicacy that uses up all your energy,’ says he. ‘What you gentlemen want to know, I’m sure, is whether I was Madeleine Bellamy’s lover and whether my wife was her murderess. That’s about it, isn’t it?’

“It was just about it, but somehow, the way he put it, it sounded not so good. ‘Well,’ said Ives, ‘I’ll give you a good straight answer to a good straight question. Get to hell out of here!’ says he, and he yanks the front door open so wide that it would have let out an army.

“Just as I was thinking of something really bright to come back with, a nice soft little voice in the back of the hall said, ‘Oh, Pat darling, do be careful. You’ll wake up the babies. I’m sure that these gentlemen will come back another time.’ And Mrs. Daniel Ives trotted up and put one hand on his arm and smiled a nice, worried, polite little smile at us.

“And Pat darling smiled, too, not so everlastingly politely, and said, ‘I’m sure they will—I’m sure of it. Four o’clock in the morning’s a good time too.’ And we decided that was as good a time as any and we went away from there. And here we are. And if you don’t look sharp they’ll have a jury before you understand why I know that Mr. Ives is the romantic type that lets realism get on his nerves. What number is that heading for the box now?”

“Otto Schultz!”

A cozy white-headed cherub trotted energetically up.

“Number 10, take your place in the box!”

“Josiah Morgan!”

“Gosh, they’ll get the whole panel in under an hour!” exulted the reporter. “Look at the fine hatchet face on Morgan, will you? I bet the fellow that tries to sell Josh a lame horse will live to rue the day.”

“Charles Stuyvesant!”

Charles Stuyvesant smiled pleasantly at the sheriff, his fine iron-gray head and trim shoulders standing out sharply against his overgroomed and undergroomed comrades in the box.

“Number 12, take your place in the box! You and each of you do solemnly swear that you will well and truly try Stephen Bellamy and Susan Ives, and a true verdict give according to the law and evidence, so help you God?”

Above the grave answering murmur the red-headed girl begged nervously, “What happens now?”

“I don’t know—recess, maybe—wait, the judge is addressing the jury.”

Judge Carver’s deep voice rang out impressively in the still courtroom:

“Gentlemen of the jury, you will now be given the usual admonition—that you are not to discuss this case amongst yourselves, or allow anybody else to discuss it with you, outside your own body. You are not to form or express any opinion about the merits of the controversy. You are to refrain from speaking of it to anybody, or from allowing anybody to speak to you with respect to any aspect of this case. If this occurs you will communicate it to the Court at once. You are to keep your judgment open until the defendants have had their side of the case heard, and, lastly, you are to make up your judgment solely on the law, which is the last thing that you will hear from the Court in its charge. Until then, you will not be able to render a verdict in accordance with the law, and therefore you must suspend judgment until that time. The Court is dismissed for the noon recess. We will reconvene at one o’clock.”

The red-headed girl turned eyes round as saucers on the reporter. “Don’t they come back till one?”

“They do not.”

“What do we do until then?”

“We eat. There’s a fair place on the next corner.”

The red-headed girl waved it away. “Oh, I couldn’t possibly eat—not possibly. It’s like the first time I went to the theatre; I was only seven, but I remember it perfectly. I sat spang in the middle of the front row, just like this, and I made my governess take me three quarters of an hour too early, and I sat there getting sicker and sicker from pure excitement, wondering what kind of a new world was behind that curtain—what kind of a strange, beautiful, terrible world. I sat there feeling more frightful every second, and all of a sudden the curtain went up with a jerk and I let out a shriek that made everyone in the theatre and on the stage jump three feet in the air. I feel exactly like that now.”

“Well, get hold of yourself. Shrieking isn’t popular around here. If you sit right there like a good quiet child I may bring you back an apple. I don’t promise anything, but I may.”

She was still sitting there when he came back with the apple, crunched up in her chair, staring at the jury box with eyes rounder than ever.

“Isn’t it nearly time?” She eyed the apple ungratefully.

“It is. Come on now, eat it, and I’ll show you what I’ve got in my pocket.”

“Show?”

“The jury list—names, addresses, ages, professions and all. Two of them are under thirty, three under forty, four under fifty, two under sixty, one sixty-two. Three merchants, two clerks, two farmers, an insurance man, an accountant, a radio expert, a jeweller and a banker. Not a bad list at all, if you ask me. Charles Stuyvesant’s the only one that won’t have a good clubby time of it. He’s one of the richest bankers in New York.”

“He looked it,” said the red-headed girl. “What will they do when they come back?”

“Well, if they’re good, the prosecutor’s going to make them a nice little speech.”

“Who is the prosecutor? Is he well known?”

“Mr. Daniel Farr is a promising young lad of about forty who is extremely well known in these parts, and if you asked him his own unbiassed opinion of his abilities, he would undoubtedly tell you that with a bit of luck he ought to be President of these United States in the next ten years.”

“And what do you think of him?”

“Well, I think that he may be, at that, and I add in passing that I consider that no tribute to the judgment of these United States. He’s about as shrewd as they make ’em, but I’m not convinced that he’s a very good lawyer. He goes in too much for purple patches and hitting about three inches below the belt for my simple tastes. And he works on the theory that the jury is not quite all there, which may be amply justified but is a little trying for the innocent bystander. He goes in for poetry, too—oh, not Amy Lowell or Ezra Pound, but something along the lines of ‘I could not love thee, dear, so much, loved I not honour more,’ and ‘How dear to my heart are the scenes of my childhood’—you know the kind of thing—deep stuff.”

“Is he successful?”

“Oh, by all manner of means. Twenty years ago he was caddie master at the Rosemont Country Club; five years before that he was a caddie there. America, my child, is the land of opportunity. He’s magnificent when he gets started on the idle rich; it’s all right to be rich if you’re not idle—or well born. If you’re one of those well born society devils, you might just as well go and jump in the lake, if you ask Mr. Farr.”

“Does he still live in Rosemont?”

“No, hasn’t lived there for nineteen years; but I don’t believe that he’s forgotten one single snub or tip that he got in the good old days. Every now and then you can see him stop and turn them over in his mind.”

“What’s Mr. Lambert like?”

“Ah, there is a horse of a different colour—a cart horse of a different colour, if I may go so far. Mr. Dudley Lambert is a lawyer who knows everything that there is to know about wills and trusts and estates, and not another blessed thing in the world. If he’s as good now as he was when I heard him in a case two years ago, he’s terrible. I can’t wait to hear him.”

The red-headed girl looked pale. “Oh, then, why did she get him?”

“Ah, thereby hangs a tale. Mr. Lambert was a side kick of old Curtiss Thorne—handled his estate and everything—and being a crusty old bachelor from the age of thirty on, he idolized the Thorne children. Sue was his pet. She still calls him Uncle Dudley, and when the split came between Sue and her father he stuck to Sue. So I suppose that it was fairly natural that she turned to him when this thing burst; he’s always handled all her affairs, and he’s probably told her that he’s the best lawyer this side of the Rocky Mountains. He believes it.”

“How old is he?”

“Sixty-three—plenty old enough to know better. You might take everything that I say about these guys with a handful of salt; it’s only fair to inform you that they are anything but popular with the Fourth Estate. The only person that talks less in this world than Dudley Lambert is Daniel Farr; either of them would make a closed steel trap seem like a chatterbox. Stephen Bellamy’s counsel is Lambert’s junior partner and under both his thumbs; he’d be a nice chap if he didn’t have lockjaw.”

“Don’t they tell you anything at all?” inquired the red-headed girl sympathetically.

“They tell us that there’s been a murder,” replied the reporter gloomily. “And I’m telling you that it’s the only murder that ever took place in the United States of America where the press has been treated like an orphan child by everyone that knows one earthly thing about it. Not one word of the hearing before the grand jury has leaked out to anyone; we haven’t been given the name of one witness, and whatever the state’s case against Stephen Bellamy and Susan Ives may be, it’s a carefully guarded secret between Mr. Daniel Farr and Mr. Daniel Farr. The defense is just as expansive. So don’t believe all you hear from me. I’d boil the lot of ’em in oil. Here comes Ben Potts. To be continued in our next.”

The red-headed girl wasn’t listening to him; she was watching the dark figure of the prosecutor, moving leisurely forward toward the little space where twelve men were seating themselves quietly and unostentatiously in their stiff, uncomfortable chairs. Twelve men—twelve everyday, ordinary, average men—— She drew a sharp breath and turned her face away for a minute. The curtain was going up.

“May it please Your Honour”—the prosecutor’s voice was very low, but as penetrating as though he were a hand-breadth away—“may it please Your Honour and gentlemen of the jury: On the night of the nineteenth of June, 1926, a little less than four months ago, a singularly cruel and ruthless murder took place not ten miles from the spot in which we have met to try the two who are accused of perpetrating it. On that summer night, which was made for youth and love and beauty, a girl who was young and beautiful and most desperately in love came out through the starlight to meet her lover. She had no right to meet him. She was another man’s wife, he was another woman’s husband. But love had made her reckless, and she came, with a black cloak flung over her white lace dress, and silver slippers that were made for dancing on feet that were made to dance—and that had danced for the last time. She was bound for the gardener’s cottage on one of the largest and oldest estates in the neighbourhood, known as Orchards. At the time of the murder, it was not occupied, and the house was for sale. She was hurrying, because she feared that she was late and that her lover might be waiting. But it was not love that waited for her in the little sitting room of the gardener’s cottage.

“If you men who sit here in judgment of her murderers think harshly of that pretty, flushed, enchanted girl hurrying through the night to her tryst, remember that that tryst was with death, not with love, and be gentle with her, even in your thoughts. She has paid more dearly for the crime of loving not wisely but too well than many of her righteous sisters.

“Next morning, at about nine o’clock, Mr. Herbert Conroy, a real-estate agent, arrived at the gardener’s cottage with a prospective client for the estate who wished to inspect the property. As he came up on the little porch he was surprised to see that the front door was slightly ajar, and thinking that sneak thieves might have broken in, he pushed it farther open and went in.

“The first floor at the right of the narrow hall was the sitting room—what was known by the people who had formerly used it as the front parlour. Mr. Conroy stepped across its threshold, and his eyes fell on a truly appalling sight. Stretched out on the floor before him was a young woman in a white lace evening gown. A table was overturned beside her. Either there had been a struggle or the table had been upset as she fell. At her feet were the fragments of a shattered lamp chimney and china shade and a brass lamp.

“The girl’s white frock was stained with blood from throat to hem; her silk stockings were clotted with it; even her silver slippers were ruinously stained. She was known to have been wearing a string of pearls, her wedding ring, and three sapphire-and-diamond rings when she left home. These jewels were missing. The girl on the floor—the girl who had been wilfully and cruelly stabbed to death—the girl whose pretty frock had been turned into a ghastly mockery, was Madeleine Bellamy, of whose murder the two defendants before you are jointly accused.

“The man on trial is Stephen Bellamy the husband of the murdered girl. The woman who sits beside him is Susan Ives, the wife of Patrick Ives, who was the lover of Madeleine Bellamy and to whom she was going on that ill-starred night in June.

“Murder, gentlemen, is an ugly and repellent thing; but this murder, I think that you will agree, is a peculiarly ugly and repellent one. It is repellent because it is the State’s contention that it was committed by a woman of birth, breeding, and refinement, to whose every instinct the very thought should have been abhorrent—because this lady was driven to this crime by a motive singularly sordid—because at her side stood a devoted husband, changed by jealousy to a beast to whom the death of his wife had become more precious than her life. It is peculiarly repellent because we propose to show that these two, with her blood still on their hands, were cool, collected, and deliberate enough to remove the jewels that she wore from her dead body in order to make this murder seem to involve robbery as a motive.

“In order to be able fully to grasp the significance of the evidence that we propose to present to you, it is necessary that you should know something of the background against which these actors played their tragic parts. As briefly as possible, then, I will sketch it for you.

“Bellechester County—your county, gentlemen, and thank God, my county—contains as many beautiful homes and delightful communities as any county in this state—or in any other state, for that matter—and no more delightful one exists than that of Rosemont, a small village about ten miles south of this courthouse. The village itself is a flourishing little place, but the real centre of attraction is the country club, about two miles from the village limits. About this centre cluster some charming homes, and in one of the most charming of them, a low, rambling, remodelled farmhouse, lived Patrick Ives and his wife. Patrick Ives is a man of about thirty-two who has made a surprising place for himself as a partner in one of the most conservative and successful investment banking houses in New York. I say surprising advisedly, for everyone was greatly surprised when about seven years ago he married Susan Thorne and settled down to serious work for the first time in his life. Up till that time, with the exception of two years at the front establishing a brilliant war record, he seems to have spent most of his time perfecting his golf game and his fox-trotting abilities and devoting the small portion of time that remained at his disposal to an anæmic real-estate business. According to all reports, he was—and is—likable, charming and immensely popular.”

“Just one moment, Mr. Farr,” Judge Carver’s deep tones cut abruptly across the prosecutor’s clear, urgent voice. “Do you propose to prove all these statements?”

“Certainly, Your Honour.”

“I do not wish in any way to hamper you, but some of this seems a little far afield.”

“I can assure Your Honour that the State proposes to connect all these facts with its case.”

“Very well, you may proceed.”

“At the time of the murder Mr. Ives’s household consisted of his wife, Susan Thorne Ives; his two children, Peter and Polly, aged five and six; his mother, Mrs. Daniel Ives, to whom he has always been an unusually devoted son; a nursery governess, Miss Kathleen Page; and some six or seven servants. The only member of the household who concerns us immediately is Susan, or, as she is known to her friends, Sue Ives.

“Mrs. Ives is a most unusual woman. The youngest child and only daughter of the immensely wealthy Curtiss Thorne, she grew up on the old Thorne estate, Orchards, the idol of her father and her two brothers. Her mother died shortly after she was born. There was no luxury, no indulgence to which she was not accustomed from her earliest childhood. She was brilliantly intellectual and excelled at every type of athletics. Society, apparently, interested her very little; but there was not a trophy that she did not promptly capture at either golf or tennis. She was not particularly attractive to men, according to local gossip, in spite of being witty, accomplished, and charming—perhaps she was too witty and too accomplished for their peace of mind. At any rate, she set the entire community by the ears about seven years ago by running off with the handsome and impecunious Patrick Ives, just back from the war.

“Old Curtiss Thorne, who detested Patrick Ives and had other plans for her, cut her off without a cent—and died two years later without a cent himself, ruined by the collapse of his business during the deflation of 1921. Just what happened to Patrick and Susan Ives during the three years after the elopement, no one knows. They disappeared into the maelstrom of New York. Mrs. Daniel Ives joined them, and somehow they must have managed to keep from starving to death. Two children were born to Susan Ives, and finally Patrick persuaded this investment house to try him out as a bond salesman. It developed that he had a positive genius for the business, and his rise has been spectacular in the extreme. He is considered to-day one of the most promising young men in the Street.

“At the end of four years, the Iveses and their babies returned to Rosemont. They bought an old farmhouse with some seven or eight acres about a mile from the club, remodelled it, landscaped it, put in a tennis court, and became the most sought-after young couple in Rosemont. On the surface, they seemed ideally happy. Two charming children, a charming home, plenty of money, congenial enough tastes—such things should go far to create a paradise, shouldn’t they? Well, down this smooth, easy, flower-strewn, and garlanded path Patrick and Susan Ives were hurrying straight toward hell. In order to understand why this was true, you must know something of two other people and their lives.

“About a mile and a half from the Ives house was another farmhouse, on the outskirts of the village, but this one had not been remodelled. It was small, shabby, in poor repair—no tennis court, no gardens, a cheap portable garage, a meagre half acre of land inadequately surrounded by a rickety fence. Everything is comparative in this world. To the dwellers in tenements and slums, that house would have been a little palace. To the dweller in the stone palaces that line the Hudson, it would be a slum. To Madeleine Bellamy, whose home it was, it was undoubtedly a constant humiliation and irritation.

“Mimi Bellamy—in all likelihood no one in Rosemont had heard her called Madeleine since the day that she was christened—Mimi Bellamy was an amazingly beautiful creature. ‘Beauty’ is a much cheapened and battered word; in murder trials it is loosely applied to either the victim or the murderess if either of them happened to be under fifty and not actually deformed. I am not referring to that type of beauty. Mimi Bellamy’s beauty was of the type that in Trojan days launched a thousand ships and in these days launches a musical comedy. Hers was beauty that is a disastrous gift—not the common-place prettiness of a small-town belle, though such, it seems, was the rôle in which fate had cast her.

“I am showing you her picture, cut from the local paper—crudely taken, crudely printed, many times enlarged, yet even all these factors cannot dim her radiance. It was taken shortly before she died—not two months before, as a matter of fact. It cannot give the flowerlike beauty of her colouring, the red-gold hair, the sea-blue eyes, the exquisite flush of exultant youth that played about her like an enchantment; but perhaps even this cold, black-and-white shadow of a laughing girl in a flowered frock will give you enough of a suggestion of her warm enchantment to make the incredible disaster that resulted from that enchantment more credible. It is for that purpose that I am showing it to you now, and to remind you, if you feel pity for another woman, that never more again in all this world will that girl’s laughter be heard, young and careless and joyous. I ask you most solemnly to remember that.

“Mimi Dawson Bellamy was the daughter of the village dressmaker, who had married Frederick Dawson, a man considerably above her socially, as he was a moderately successful real-estate broker in the village of Rosemont. He was by no manner of means a member of the local smart set, however, and was not even a member of the country club. They lived in a comfortable, unpretentious house a little off the main street, and in the boarding house next to them lived Mrs. Daniel Ives and her son Patrick.

“Mrs. Ives, a widow, was very highly regarded in the village, to which she had come many years previously, and was extremely industrious in her efforts to supplement their meagre income. She gave music lessons, did mending, looked after small children whose mothers were at the movies, and did everything in her power to assist her son, whose principal contribution to their welfare up to the time that he was twenty-one seemed to be a genuine devotion to his mother. At that age Mr. Dawson took him in to work with him in the real-estate business, hoping that his charm and engaging manners would make up for his lack of experience and industry. To a certain extent they did, but they created considerably more havoc with Mr. Dawson’s beautiful daughter than they did with his clients. A boy-and-girl affair immediately sprang up between these two—the exquisite, precocious child of seventeen and the handsome boy of twenty-two were seen everywhere together, and it was a thoroughly understood thing that Mimi Dawson and Pat Ives were going together, and that one of these days they would go as far as the altar.

“A year later war was declared. Patrick Ives enlisted at once, and was among the first to reach France. The whole village believed that if he came back alive he would marry Mimi. But they were counting without Mimi.

“War, gentlemen, changed more things than the map of Europe. It changed the entire social map in many an American community; it changed, drastically and surprisingly, the social map of the community of Rosemont in the county of Bellechester. For the first time since the country club was built and many of the residents of New York discovered that it was possible to live in the country and work in the city, the barrier between the villagers and the country club members was lowered, and over this lowered barrier stepped Mimi Dawson, straight into the charmed sewing circles, knitting circles, Red Cross circles, bandage-making circles that had sprung up over-night—straight, moreover, into the charmed circle of society, about whose edges she had wistfully hovered—and straight, moreover, into the life of Elliot Farwell.

“Elliot Farwell was the younger brother of Mrs. George Dallas, at whose house met the Red Cross Circle of which Mrs. Dallas was president. Many of the village girls were asked to join her class in bandage making—after all, we were fighting this war to make the world safe for democracy, so why not be democratic? A pair of hands from the village was just as good as a pair of hands from the club—possibly better. So little Mimi Dawson found herself sitting next to the great Miss Thorne, wrapping wisps of cotton about bits of wood and going home to the village with rapidly increasing regularity in Mr. Elliot Farwell’s new automobile, quite without the knowledge or sanction of Mr. Farwell’s sister, whose democracy might not have stood the strain.

“Elliot Farwell was one of the two or three young men left in Rosemont. His eyes made it impossible for him to get into any branch of the service, so he remained peaceably at home, attending to a somewhat perfunctory business in the city as a promoter. He would have had to be blind enough to require the services of a dog and a tin cup not to have noted Mimi Dawson’s beauty, however; as a matter of fact, he noted it so intently that three months after peace was declared and three weeks before Patrick Ives returned from the war, Mr. and Mrs. Frederick Dawson announced the engagement of their daughter Madeleine to Mr. Elliot Farwell—and a startled world. Not the least startled member of this world, possibly, was Susan Thorne, to whom young Farwell had been moderately attentive for several years.

“Such was the state of affairs when the tide of exodus to Europe turned, and back on the very crest of the incoming waves rode Major Patrick Ives, booted, spurred, belted, and decorated—straight over the still-lowered barrier into the very heart of the country-club set. He was, not unnaturally, charmed with his surroundings, and apparently the fact that he found Mimi Dawson already installed there with a fiancé did not dampen his spirits in the slightest. From the day that he first went around the golf course with Susan Thorne, he was as invariably at her side as her shadow. Mr. Curtiss Thorne’s open and violent disapproval left them unchastened and inseparable. Apparently they found the world well lost, as did Farwell and his fiancée. And into the midst of this idyllic scene, a month or so later, wanders the last of our actors, Stephen Bellamy.

“Stephen Bellamy was older than these others—seven years older than Susan Thorne or Patrick Ives, twelve years older than the radiant Mimi. He was the best friend of Susan’s elder brother Douglas, and a junior partner of Curtiss Thorne. He had done well in the war, as he had in his business, and he was generally supposed to be the best masculine catch in Rosemont—intelligent, distinguished, and thoroughly substantial. It was everybody’s secret that Curtiss Thorne wanted him for his son-in-law, and he and Elliot Farwell were the nearest approaches to beaus that Susan Thorne had had before the war.

“Within a week of their respective returns, she had lost both of them. The sober, reserved, conservative Stephen Bellamy fell even more violently and abjectly a victim to Mimi Dawson’s charms than had Elliot Farwell. The fact that she was engaged to another man who had been at least a pleasant acquaintance of his did not seem to deter Mr. Bellamy for a second. At any rate, the third week in June in 1919 brought three shocks to the conservative community of Rosemont that left it rocking for many moons to come. On Monday, after a violent and public quarrel with Farwell, Mimi Dawson broke her engagement to him; on Wednesday Sue Thorne eloped with Patrick Ives, and on Thursday Miss Dawson and Mr. Bellamy were married by the justice of the peace in this very courthouse.

“It is a long stride from that amazing week in June to another June, but I ask you to make it with me. In the seven years that have passed, the seeds that were sown in those far-off days—seeds of discord, of heartbreak, of envy and malice—have waxed and grown into a mighty vine, heavy with bitter fruit; and the day of harvest is at hand—and the hands of the harvesters shall be red. But on this peaceful sunny summer afternoon of the nineteenth of June, 1926, those who are sitting in the vine’s shadow seem to find it a tranquil and a pleasant place.

“It is five o’clock at the Rosemont Country Club, and the people that I have brought before you in the brief time at my disposal are gathered on the lawn in front of the club; the golfers are just coming in; it is the prettiest and gayest hour of the day. Mimi Bellamy is there, waiting for her husband. She has driven over in their little car to take him home for supper; it is parked just now beside Sue Ives’s sleek and shining car with its sleek and shining chauffeur, and possibly Mimi Bellamy is wondering what strange fate makes one man a failure in the world of business and another a success. For the industrious and intelligent Stephen Bellamy has never recovered from the setback that he received when Curtiss Thorne’s business crashed; he is still struggling valiantly to keep a roof over his wife’s enchanting head—he can do little more. True, they have a maid of all work and a man of all work; but Sue Ives, who married the village ne’er-do-well, has eight servants and three cars and the prettiest gardens in Rosemont. So does fate make fools of the shrewdest of us!

“Gathered about in little groups are the George Dallases, Elliot Farwell, and Richard Burgoyne, the man with whom he keeps bachelor hall in a small bungalow near the village; the Ned Conroys and Sue Ives, whose husband has been cheated out of golf by a business engagement in the city, in spite of the fact that it is Saturday afternoon. She has, however, found another cavalier. Seated on the club steps, a little apart from the others, she is deep in conversation with Elliot Farwell, who is consuming his third highball in rapid succession. Gentlemen, if I could let you eavesdrop on the seemingly casual and actually momentous discussion that is going on behind those amiable masks, much that is dark to you now would be clear as day. I ask your patient and intelligent interest until that moment arrives. It will arrive, I promise you.

“For here, on this sunlit lawn, I propose to leave them for the present. Others will tell you what happened from that sunlit moment until the dark and dreadful one in the gardener’s little cottage, when a knife rose and fell. I have not gone thus exhaustively into the shadowy past from which these figures sprang in order to retail to you the careless chatter of a country club and a country village. I have gone into it because I have felt it entirely imperative that you should know the essential facts in the light of which you will be able to read more clearly the evidence that I am about to submit to you. It is inevitable that each one of you must say to himself as you sit there: ‘How is it possible that this young woman seated before our eyes, charming, well bred, sheltered, controlled, intelligent—how is it possible that this woman can have wilfully, brutally, and deliberately murdered another woman? How is it possible that the man seated beside her, a gentleman born and bred, irreproachable in every phase of his past life, can have aided and abetted her in her project?’

“How are these things possible, you ask? Gentleman, I say to you that we expect to prove that these things are not possible—we expect to prove that these things are certain. I am speaking neither rashly nor lightly when I assure you that the state believes that it can demonstrate their certainty beyond the shadow of a possible doubt. I am not seeking a conviction; I am no bloodhound baying for a victim. If you can find it in your hearts when I have done with this case to hold these two guiltless, you will, indeed, be fortunate—and I can find in my heart no desire to deprive you of that good fortune. It is my most painful duty, however, to place the facts before you and to let them speak for themselves.

“I ask you, gentlemen, to bear these things in mind. Susan Ives is a woman accustomed to luxury and security; she has once before been roughly deprived of it. What dreadful scars those three years in New York left on the gallant and spirited girl who went so recklessly to face them we can only surmise. But perhaps it is sufficient to say that the scars seared so deep that they sealed her lips forever. I have not been able to discover that she has mentioned them to one solitary soul, and I have questioned many. She was threatened with a hideous repetition of this nightmare. Her religious principles, as you will learn, prevented her from ever accepting or seeking a divorce, and she was too intelligent not to be fully aware that if Patrick Ives ran away with Mimi Bellamy, he would inevitably have lost his position in the ultra-conservative house in which he was a partner, and thus be absolutely precluded from providing for her or her children, even if he had so desired.

“The position of a young woman thrown entirely on her own resources, with two small children on her hands, is a desperate one, and it is our contention that Susan Ives turned to desperate remedies. Added to this terror was what must have been a truly appalling hatred for the girl who was about to turn her sunny and sheltered existence into a nightmare. Cupidity, love, revenge—every murder in this world that is not the result of a drunken blow springs from one of these motives. Gentlemen, the state contends that Susan Ives was moved by all three.

“As for Stephen Bellamy, his idolatry of his young and beautiful wife was his life—a drab and colourless life save for the light and colour that she brought to it. When he discovered that she had turned that idolatry to mockery, madness descended on him—the madness that sent Othello staggering to his wife’s bed with death in his hands; the madness that has caused that wretched catch phrase ‘the unwritten law’ to become almost as potent as our written code—to our shame, be it said. Do not be deceived by the memory of that phrase, gentlemen. There was another law, written centuries ago in letters of flame on the peaks of a mountain—‘Thou shalt not kill.’ Remember that law written in flame and forget the one that has been traced only in the blood of its victims. These two before you stand accused of breaking that law, written on Sinai—that sacred law on which hangs all the security of the society that we have so laboriously wrought out of chaos and horror—and we are now about to show you why they are thus accused.

“From the first step that each took toward the dark way that was to lead them to the room in the gardener’s cottage, we will trace them—to its very threshold—across its threshold. There I will leave them, my duty will have been done. Yours, gentlemen, will be yet to do, and I am entirely convinced that, however painful, however hateful, however dreadful, it may seem to you, you will not shrink from performing that duty.”

The compelling voice with its curious ring fell abruptly to silence—a silence that lingered, deepened, and then abruptly broke into irrepressible and incautious clamour.

“Silence! Silence!”

Ben Potts’s voice and Judge Carver’s gavel thundered down the voices.

“Once and for all, this courtroom is not a place for conversation. Kindly remain silent while you are in it. Court is dismissed for the day. It will convene again at ten to-morrow.”

The red-headed girl dragged stiffly to her feet. The first day of the Bellamy trial was over.

Chapter II

The red-headed girl was late. The clock over the courtroom door said three minutes past ten. She flung herself, breathless, into the seat next to the lanky young man and inquired in a tragic whisper, “Have they started?”

“Nope,” replied that imperturbable individual. “Calm yourself. You haven’t missed a single hear ye. Your hat’s a good deal over one eye.”

“I ran all the way from the station,” gasped the red-headed girl. “Every step. There’s not a taxi in this whole abominable place. And you were gone last night before I had a chance to ask you what you thought of the prosecutor’s speech.”

“Perhaps that’s why I went.”

“No, truly, what did you think of it?”

“Well, I think that boys being boys, jurors being jurors, prosecutors being prosecutors, and Mrs. Patrick Ives being Mrs. Patrick Ives, he did about as well as could be expected—better than I expected.”

“He can’t prove all those things, can he?” asked the red-headed girl, looking a little pale.

“Ah, that’s it! When you get right down to it, the only things of any importance that he claimed he was going to prove were in one last sentence: That Bellamy and Sue Ives met and went to the front parlour of the gardener’s cottage, to confront Mimi Bellamy—that’s his case. And a pretty good case, too, if you ask me. The rest of it was just a lot of good fancy, expansive words strung together in order to create pity, horror, prejudice, and suspicion in the eyes of the jury. And granted that purpose, they weren’t bad words, though there were a few bits that absolutely yelled for ‘Hearts and Flowers’ on muted strings somewhere in the background—that little piece about going through the starlight to her lover. . . .”

“I thought the idea was that the prosecutor was after truth, not a conviction,” said the red-headed girl gravely.

“The ideal, not the idea, my child. You didn’t precisely get the notion that he was urging the jury to consider that, though there was a pretty strong case against Mrs. Ives and Stephen Bellamy, there were a whole lot of other people who might have done it too—or did you?”

“He certainly said most distinctly that he wasn’t any bloodhound baying for a victim.”

“Well, if he isn’t, I’ll bet that he gives such a good imitation of one that if Eliza should happen to hear him while she was crossing the ice she’d take two cakes at one jump. What did I tell you about Mr. Farr and the classics? Did you get ‘she loved not wisely but too well’? That beats ‘I could not not love thee, dear, so much.’ ”

Ben Potts’s high, clear voice pulled them abruptly to their feet. “The Court!”

Through the little door behind the dais came the tall figure of Judge Carver, his spacious silks folding him in dignity—rather a splendid figure. The jury, the counsel, the defendants—Mrs. Ives was wearing the same hat . . .

“Hear ye! Hear ye! Hear ye! All those having business before this honourable court draw near, give your attention, and you shall be heard!”

The clear singsong was drowned in the rustle of those in the courtroom sinking back into their seats.

“Is Mr. Conroy in court?”

“Mr. Herbert Conroy!” intoned the crier.

All heads turned to watch the small spare figure hurrying down the aisle toward the witness box.

“You do solemnly swear that the testimony that you shall give to the court and jury in this case now on trial shall be truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help you God?”

“I do.”

Mr. Conroy’s faded blue eyes darted about him quietly as he mounted the stand, as though he were looking for a way out.

“Mr. Conroy, what is your profession?”

“I am a real-estate broker.”

“Is your office in Rosemont?”

“No, sir; my office is in New York. My home, however, is in Brierdale, about three miles north of Rosemont.”

“Have you the agency of the Thorne property, Orchards?”

“I have.”

“To whom does that property belong?”

“It was left by Mr. Curtiss Thorne’s will to his two sons, Charles and Douglas. Charles was killed in the war, and it therefore reverted to the elder son, Douglas. He is now the sole owner.”

“And he placed it with you to sell?”

“To sell or to rent—preferably to sell.”

“Have you had offers for it?”

“None that we regarded as satisfactory; it was too large a property to appeal to the average man in the market for a country home, as it consisted of more than eighty acres and a house of twenty-four rooms. On the afternoon of the nineteenth of June, 1926, however, I showed the photographs of the house to a gentleman from Cleveland who was about to transfer his business to the East. He was delighted with them and made no quibble about the price if the property proved to be all that it seemed.”

“You were in New York at this time?”

“Yes; and a dinner engagement there prevented me from taking him out to Rosemont that afternoon. He was extremely anxious, however, to see it as soon as possible, as he was leaving for the West the following afternoon. So I arranged to take him next morning at nine o’clock.”

“And did so?”

“And did so.”

“Now will you be good enough to tell us, Mr. Conroy, just what happened when you arrived with this gentleman at Orchards on the morning of the twentieth?”

“We drove out from New York in my roadster, arriving at the lodge gates of the property shortly after nine o’clock, I should say. I was to collect the keys under the doormat at the gardener’s cottage, which was halfway between the lodge and the main house——”

“Just a moment, Mr. Conroy. Was the lodge occupied?”

“No; at this particular time no building on the place was occupied. In Mr. Curtiss Thorne’s day, the lodge was occupied by the chauffeur and his family, the gardener’s cottage by the gardener and his family, and there was another cottage used by a farmer on the extreme western boundary. None of these had been occupied for some time, with the exception of the gardener’s cottage, whose occupants had been given a vacation of two months in order to visit their aged parents in Italy. Shall I go on?”

“Please.”

“The gardener’s cottage is a low five-room building at a bend of the road, and is practically concealed as you approach it from the main driveway by the very high shrubbery that surrounds it—lilacs, syringa, and the like. There is a little drive that shoots off from the main driveway and circles the cottage, and we drove in there, to the front of the house, and mounted the steps to the front porch, as my client wished to see the interior. Just as I bent down to secure the keys, I was surprised to see that the door was slightly ajar. I picked up the keys, pushed it farther open, and went in, rather expecting that sneak thieves might have preceded me.”

Mr. Conroy paused for a moment in his steady, precise narrative, his pale face a little paler. “Shall I continue?”

“Certainly.”

“On my left was the dining room, with the door closed; on my right, the room known as the parlour. The door was open, but only a small section of the room was visible from the corridor, and it was not until I had crossed the threshold that I realized that something frightful had occurred. In the corner of the room farthest from the door——”

“Just a minute, please. Was your client with you when you entered the room?”

“He was a step or so behind me, I believe. In the corner of the room was the—the body of a young woman in a white frock. A small table was overturned beside her, and at her feet was a lamp, the chimney and shade shattered and some oil spilled on the floor. The smell of the kerosene was very strong—very strong indeed.”

Mr. Conroy looked a little ill, as though the odour of that spilled kerosene were still about him.

“Was the girl’s head toward you, or her feet, Mr. Conroy?”

“Her feet. Her head was resting on the corner of a low fender—a species of steel railing—that circled the base of a Franklin stove.”

“Did you notice anything else?”

“Yes; I noticed that there was blood.” He glanced about him swiftly, as though he were startled by the sound of the word, and lowered his voice. “A great deal of blood.”

“On the dress?”

“Principally on the dress. I believe that there was also a little on the carpet, though I could not be sure of that. But principally it was on the dress.”

“Can you tell us about the dress?”

Again Mr. Conroy’s haunted eyes went wandering. “The dress? It was soaked in blood, sir—I think I may say that it was soaked in blood.”

“No, no—I mean what kind of a dress was it? An evening dress?”

“Well, I hardly know. I suppose you might call it that. Not a ball gown, you understand—just a thin lacy dress, with the neck cut out a little and short sleeves. I remember that quite well—the lady’s arms were bare.”

The prosecutor, who had been carelessly fingering some papers and pamphlets on the top of a small square box, brushed them impatiently aside and scooped something else out of its depths.

“Was this the dress, Mr. Conroy?”

The long screech of Mr. Conroy’s chair as he shoved it violently back tore through the courtroom like something human, echoing through every heart. The prosecutor was nonchalantly dangling before the broker’s staring eyes a crumpled object—a white dress, streaked and splotched and dotted with that most ominous colour known to the eyes of man—the curious rusted sinister red of dried blood.

“Yes,” said Mr. Conroy, his voice barely above a whisper—“yes, yes; that is it—that is the dress.”

The fascinated eyes of the spectators wrenched themselves from the dress to the two defendants. Susan Ives was not looking at it. Her head was as high as ever, her lips as steady, but her eyes were bent intently on a scrap of paper that she held in her gloved fingers. Apparently Mrs. Ives was deeply interested in the contents.

Stephen Bellamy was not reading. He sat watching that handful of lace and blood as though it were Medusa’s head, his blank, unswerving eyes riveted to it by something inexorable and intolerable. His face was as quiet as Susan Ives’s, save for a dreadful little ripple of muscles about the set mouth—the ripple that comes from clenched teeth, clenched harder, harder—harder still, lest there escape through them some sound not meant for decent human ears. Save for that ripple, he did not move a hairbreadth.

“Was the blood on this dress dry when you first saw it, Mr. Conroy?”

“No, it was not dry.”

“You ascertained that by touching it?”

Mr. Conroy’s small neat body seemed to contract farther into itself.

“No, I did not touch it. It was not necessary to touch it to see that. It—it was quite apparent.”

“I see. Your Honour, I ask to have this dress marked for identification.”

“It may be marked,” said Judge Carver quietly, eyeing it steadily and gravely for a moment before he returned to his notes.

“Got that?” inquired Mr. Farr briskly, handing it over to the clerk of the court. “I offer it in evidence.”

“Are there any objections?” inquired Judge Carver.

“Your Honour, I fail to see what necessity there is for——”

The judge cut sharply across Lambert’s voice: “You are not required to be the arbiter of that, Mr. Lambert. The state is conducting its case without your assistance, to the best of my knowledge. Do you object, and if so, on what grounds?”

Mr. Lambert’s ruddy countenance became a shade more ruddy. He opened his mouth, thought better of it, and closed it with an audible snap. “No objection.”

“Mr. Conroy, did you notice whether the slippers were stained?”

“Yes—yes, they were considerably stained.”

“What type of slippers were they?”

“They were shiny slippers, with very high heels and some kind of bright, sparkling little buckles, I believe.”

“Like these?” Once more the resourceful Mr. Farr had delved into the square box, and he placed the result of his research deftly on the edge of the witness box. A pair of silver slippers with rhinestone buckles, exquisite and inadequate enough for the most foolish of women, small enough for a man to hold in one outstretched hand—sparkling, absurd, and coquettish, they perched on that dark rim, the buckles gleaming valiantly above the dark and sinister splotches that turned them from gay and charming toys to tokens of horror.

“Those are the slippers,” said Mr. Conroy, his shaken voice barely audible.

“I offer them in evidence.”

“No objections.” Mr. Lambert’s voice was an objection in itself.

“Now, Mr. Conroy, will you be good enough to tell us what you did as soon as you made this discovery?”

“I said to my client, ‘There has been foul play here. We must get the police.’ ”

“No, not what you said, Mr. Conroy—what you did.”

“I returned to my roadster with my client, locking the front door behind me with a key from the ring that I had found under the doormat, and drove as rapidly as possible to police headquarters in Rosemont, reporting what I had discovered.”

“Just what did you report?”

“I reported that I had found the body of Mrs. Stephen Bellamy in the gardener’s cottage of the old Thorne place, and that it looked as though she had been murdered.”

“Oh, you recognized Mrs. Bellamy?”

“Yes. She was a friend of my sister-in-law, who lives in Rosemont. I had met her on two occasions.”

“And what did you do then?”

“I considered that the matter was then out of my hands, but I endeavoured to reach Mr. Douglas Thorne by telephone, to tell him what had occurred. I was not successful, however, and returned immediately to New York with my client.”

“He decided not to inspect the place farther?”

For the first time Mr. Conroy permitted himself a small, pallid, apologetic ghost of a smile. “Exactly. He decided that under the circumstances he did not desire to go farther with the transaction. It did not seem to him, if I may so express it, a particularly auspicious omen.”

“Well, that’s quite comprehensible. Did you notice when you were in this parlour whether Mrs. Bellamy was wearing any jewellery, Mr. Conroy?”

“To the best of my recollection, she was not, sir.”

“You are quite sure of that?”

“I am not able to swear to it, but it is my distinct impression that she was not. I was only in the room a minute or so, you understand, but I still retain a most vivid picture of it—a most vivid picture, I may say.”

Mr. Conroy passed a weary hand over his high brow, and that vivid picture seemed suddenly to float before the eyes of every occupant of the court.

“You did not see a weapon?”

“No. I could not swear that one was not there, but certainly I did not see one.”

“I understood you to say that you locked the front door of the gardener’s cottage with one of the keys that you found on the ring under the mat. How many keys were on that ring?”

“Seven or eight, I think—a key to the lodge, to the garage opposite the lodge, to the gardener’s cottage, to the farmer’s house, to the front and back doors of the main house, and to the cellar—possibly others.”

“Didn’t it ever strike you as a trifle imprudent to keep these keys in such an unprotected spot, Mr. Conroy?”

“We did not consider it an unprotected spot, sir. The gardener’s cottage was a long way from the road, and it did not seem at all likely that they would be discovered.”

“Whom do you mean by ‘we,’ Mr. Conroy?”

Mr. Conroy made a small restless movement. “I was referring to Mr. Douglas Thorne and myself.”

“Oh, Mr. Thorne knew that the keys were kept there, did he?”

“Oh, quite so—naturally.”

“Why ‘naturally,’ Mr. Conroy?”

“I said naturally—I said naturally because Mr. Thorne had placed them there himself.”

“Oh, I see. And when had Mr. Thorne placed them there?”

“He had placed them there on the previous evening.”

“On the previous evening?” Even the prosecutor’s voice sounded startled.

“Yes.”

“At what time?”

“I am not sure of the exact time.”

“Well, can you tell us approximately?”

“I am not able to state positively even the approximate time.”

“Was it before seven in the evening?”

“I do not believe so.”

“How did you acquire the knowledge that Mr. Thorne was to leave those keys at the cottage, Mr. Conroy?”

“By telephone.”

“Mr. Thorne telephoned you?”

“No, I telephoned Mr. Thorne.”

“At what time?”

“At about half-past six on the evening of the nineteenth.”

“I see. Will you be good enough to give us the gist of what you said to him over the telephone?”

“I had been trying to reach Mr. Thorne for some time, both at his home in Lakedale and in town.”

“Mr. Thorne does not live in Rosemont?”

“No; he lives the other side of Lakedale, which is about twelve miles nearer New York. When I finally reached him, after his return from a golf match, I explained to him the urgency of getting into the house as early as possible the following morning and suggested that he might drive over after dinner and leave the keys under the mat of the cottage. I apologized to Mr. Thorne for causing him so much trouble, and he remarked that it was no trouble at all, as——”

“No, not what he remarked, Mr. Conroy—only what you said.”

“I do not remember that I said anything further of any importance.”

“Do you know at what time Mr. Thorne is in the habit of dining, Mr. Conroy?”

“I do not, sir.”

“How long should you say that it would take to drive from Mr. Thorne’s home to Orchards?”

“It is, roughly, about fourteen miles. I should imagine that it would depend entirely on the rate at which you drove.”

“Driving at an ordinary rate, some thirty-five to forty minutes, should you say?”

“Possibly.”

“So that if Mr. Thorne had finished his dinner at about eight, he would have arrived at Orchards shortly before nine?”

“I really couldn’t tell you, Mr. Farr. You know quite as much about that as I do.”

Mr. Conroy’s small, harassed, unhappy face looked almost defiant for a moment, and then wavered under the geniality of the prosecutor’s infrequent smile.

“I believe that you are right, Mr. Conroy.” He turned abruptly toward the court crier. “Is Mr. Douglas Thorne in court?”

“Mr. Douglas Thorne!” intoned the crier in his high, pleasant falsetto.

A tall lean man, bronzed and distinguished, rose promptly to his feet from his seat in the fourth row. “Here, sir.”

“Mr. Thorne, will you be good enough to speak to me after court is over? . . . Thanks. That will be all, Mr. Conroy. Cross-examine.”

Mr. Lambert approached the witness box with a curious air of caution.

“It was entirely at your suggestion that Mr. Thorne brought the keys, was it not, Mr. Conroy?”

“Oh, certainly—entirely.”

“He might have left them there at eight o’clock or at even eleven o’clock, as far as you know?”

“Exactly.”

“That is all, Mr. Conroy.”

“No further questions,” said the prosecutor curtly. “Call Dr. Paul Stanley.”

“Dr. Paul Stanley!”

The man who took Herbert Conroy’s place in the witness box was a comfortable-looking individual with a fine thatch of gray hair and an amiable and intelligent countenance, which he turned benignly on the prosecutor.

“What is your profession, Dr. Stanley?”

“I am a surgeon. In my early youth I was that now fabulous creature, a general practitioner.”

He smiled engagingly at the prosecutor, and the crowded courtroom relaxed. A nice, restful individual, after the haunted little real-estate broker.

“You have performed autopsies before, Dr. Stanley?”

“Frequently.”

“And in this case you performed the autopsy on the body of Madeleine Bellamy?”

“I did.”

“Where did you first see the body?”

“In the front room of the gardener’s cottage on the Thorne estate.”

“Did you hear Mr. Conroy’s testimony?”

“Yes.”

“Was the body in the position in which he described it at the time that he saw it?”

“In exactly that position. Later, for purposes of the autopsy, it was removed to the room opposite—the dining room.”

“Please tell us under what circumstances you first saw the body.”

“Certainly.” Dr. Stanley settled himself a trifle more comfortably in his chair and turned a trifle toward the jury, who stared back gratefully into his friendly countenance. If Dr. Stanley had been explaining just how he reeled in the biggest trout of the season, he could not have looked more affably at ease. “I went out to the cottage with my friend Elias Dutton, the coroner, and two or three state troopers. Mr. Conroy had turned over the key to the cottage to us, and we found everything as he had described it to us.”

“Were there signs of a struggle?”

“You mean on the body?”

“Yes—scratches, bruises, torn or disarranged clothing?”

“No, there were no signs of any description of a struggle, save for the overturned table and the lamp.”

“Might that have happened when Mrs. Bellamy fell?”

“The table might very readily have been overturned at that time; it was toward Mrs. Bellamy’s head and almost on top of the body. The lamp, on the other hand, was practically at her feet.”

“Could it have rolled there as the table crashed?”

“Possibly, but it’s doubtful. The fragments of lamp chimney and shade were there, too, you see, some six feet away from the table.”

“I see. Will you tell us now, Dr. Stanley, just what caused the death of Mrs. Bellamy?”

“Mrs. Bellamy’s heart was punctured by some sharp instrument—a knife, I should say.”

“There was only one wound?”

“Yes.”

“Will you please describe it to us?”

“There was a clean incision about three quarters of an inch long in the skin just over the heart. The instrument had penetrated to a depth of approximately three inches, and had passed between the ribs over the heart.”

“Was it necessary that the blow should have been delivered with great force?”

“Not necessarily. If the knife had struck a rib, it would have taken considerable force to deflect it, but in this case it encountered no obstacle whatever.”

“So that a woman with a strong wrist could have struck the blow?”

“Oh, certainly—or a woman with a weak wrist—or a child—or a strong man, as far as that goes. There is no evidence at all from the wound as to the force with which the blow was delivered.”

“I see.” Mr. Farr reached casually over to the clerk’s desk and handed Dr. Stanley the dreadful rag that had been Madeleine Bellamy’s white lace dress. “Do you recognize this dress, Doctor?”

“Perfectly.”

“Will you be good enough to indicate to us just where the knife penetrated the fabric?”

Dr. Stanley turned it deftly in his long-fingered, capable hands. Something in that skilful scientific touch seemed to purge it of horror—averted eyes travelled back to it warily.

“The knife went through it right here. If you look closely, you can see the severed threads—just here, where the stain is darkest.”

“Exactly. Would such a wound have caused instantaneous death, Doctor, in your opinion?”

“Not instantaneous—no. Death would follow very rapidly, however.”

“A minute or so?”

“A few minutes—the loss of blood would be tremendous.”

“Would the victim be likely to make much outcry—screaming, moaning, or the like?”

“Well, it’s a little difficult to generalize about that. In this particular case, there is reason to doubt whether there was any outcry after the blow was struck.”

“What reason have you to suppose that?”

“I think that Mr. Conroy has already testified that Mrs. Bellamy’s head was resting on the corner of a steel fire guard—a pierced railing about six inches high. It is my belief that, when she received the blow, she staggered, clutched at the table, and fell, striking the back of her head against the railing with sufficient force to render her totally unconscious. There was a serious abrasion at the back of the head that leads me to draw that conclusion.”

“I see. Was Mrs. Bellamy wearing any jewellery when you saw her, Doctor—a necklace, rings, brooches?”

“I saw no jewellery of any kind on the body.”

“What type of knife should you say was used to commit this murder, Doctor?”

“Well, that’s a little difficult to say. There were no marked peculiarities about the wound. It might have been caused by almost any knife with a sharp blade about three quarters of an inch wide and from three to four inches long—a sheath knife, a small kitchen knife, a large jackknife or clasp knife—various types, as I say.”

“Could it have been made with this?”

The prosecutor dropped a small dark object into the doctor’s outstretched hand and stood aside so that the jury, galvanized to goggle-eyed attention, could see it better. It was a knife—a large jackknife, with a rough, corrugated bone handle.

Mr. Lambert bore down on the scene at a subdued gallop. “Are you offering this knife in evidence?”

“I am not.”

Judge Carver leaned forward, his black silk robes rustling ominously. “What is this knife, Mr. Farr?”

“This is a knife, Your Honour, that I propose to connect up with the case at a somewhat later stage. At present I ask to have it marked for identification merely for purposes of the record.”

“You say that you will be able to connect it?”

“Absolutely.”

“Very well, you may answer the question, Dr. Stanley.”

The doctor was inspecting it gravely, his eyes bright with interest.

“I may open it?”

“Please do.”

In the breathless stillness the little click as the large blade sprang back was clearly audible. Dr. Stanley bent over it attentively, passed a forefinger reflectively along its shining surface, raised his head. “Yes, it could quite easily have been done with this.”

The prosecutor snapped the blade to with an enigmatic smile. “Thank you. That will be all.”

“Miss Kathleen Page!”

Before the ring of that high imperious summons had died in the air, she was there—a demure and dainty wraith, all in gray from the close feathered hat to the little buckled shoes. A pale oval face that might have belonged to the youngest and smallest of Botticelli’s Madonnas; cloudy eyes to match her frock, extravagantly fringed with heavy lashes; a forlorn, coaxing little mouth; sleek coils of dark hair. A murmur of interest rose, swelled, and died under Judge Carver’s eagle eye.

“Miss Page, what is your present occupation?”

“I am a librarian at a branch public library in New York.”

“Is that your regular occupation?”

“It has been for the past six months.”

“Was it previous to that time?”

“Do you mean immediately previous?”

“At any time previous.”

“I was assistant librarian in White Plains from 1921 to 1925.”

“And after that?”

“During February of 1925 I had a serious attack of flu. It left me in rather bad shape, and the doctor recommended that I try to get some work in the country that would keep me outdoors a good deal and give me plenty of sleep.”

“And did you decide on any occupation that would fit those requirements?”

“Yes. Dr. Leonard suggested that I might try for a position as governess. One of his patients was looking for a temporary governess for her children, and he suggested that I might try that.”

“And did you?”

“Yes.”

“You were successful?”

“Yes.”

“Who was the patient suggested by Dr. Leonard?”

“Mrs. Ives.”

As though the name were a magnet, the faces in the courtroom swung in a brief half circle toward its owner. There she sat in her brief tweed skirt and loose jacket, the bright little felt hat pulled severely down over the shining wings of her hair, her hidden eyes riveted on her clasped hands in their fawn-coloured gauntlets. At the sound of her name she lifted her head, glanced briefly and levelly at the greedy, curious faces pressing toward her, less briefly and more levelly at the seraphic countenance under the drooping feather on the witness stand, and returned to the gloves. Only the curve of her lips remained for the benefit of those prying eyes—a lovely curve, ironic and inscrutable. The half circle swung back to the demure occupant of the witness box.

“And how long were you in Mrs. Ives’s employment?”

“Until June, 1926.”

“What day of the month?”

“The twenty-first.”

“Then on the night of the nineteenth of June you were still in the employment of Mrs. Ives?”

“Yes.”

“Will you be good enough to tell us just what you were doing at eight o’clock that evening?”

“I had finished supper at a little before eight and was just settling down to read in the day nursery when I remembered that I had left my book down by the sand pile at the end of the garden, where I had been playing with the children before supper. So I went down to get it.”

“Had you any way of fixing the time?”

“Yes. I heard the dining room clock strike eight as I went by. I noticed it especially, as I thought, ‘That’s eight o’clock and it’s still broad daylight.’ ”

“Did you see anyone on your way out of the house?”

“I met Mr. Ives just outside the nursery door. He had come in late to dinner and hadn’t come up to say good-night to the children before. He asked if they had gone to bed. . . . Shall I go on?”

“Certainly.”

“I said that they were in bed but not asleep, and asked him please not to get them too excited. He had a boat for little Peter in his hand and I was afraid that he would get him in such a state that I wouldn’t be able to do anything with him at all.”

“A boat? What kind of a boat?”

“A little sailboat—a model of a schooner. Mr. Ives had been working on it for some time.”

“Made it himself, had he?”

“Yes. He was very clever at that kind of thing. He’d made Polly a wonderful doll house.”

“Your Honour——”

“Try to confine yourself directly to the question, Miss Page.”

“Yes, Your Honour.” The meek contrition of the velvet-voiced Miss Page was a model for all future witnesses.

“Was Mr. Ives fond of the children?”

“Oh, yes, he adored——”

“I object to that question, Your Honour.” The preliminary tossings had resolved themselves into an actual upheaval this time and all of the two hundred and fifty pounds of Mr. Lambert were on his feet.

“Very well, Mr. Lambert, you may be heard. You object on what grounds?”

“I object to this entire line of questioning as absolutely immaterial, incompetent and irrelevant. How is Miss Page qualified to judge as to Mr. Ives’s affection for his children? And even if her opinion had the slightest weight, what has his affection for his children got to do with the murder of this girl? For reasons which I don’t pretend to grasp, the learned counsel for the prosecution is simply wasting the time of this court.”

“You might permit the Court to be the judge of that.” Judge Carver’s fine dark eyes rested somewhat critically on the protestant bulk before him. “Mr. Farr, you may be heard.”

“Of course, Your Honour, with all due deference to my brilliant opponent’s fireworks, he’s talking pure nonsense. Miss Page is perfectly——”

Judge Carver’s gavel fell with a crash. “Mr. Farr, the Court must ask you once and for all to keep to the matter in hand. Can you connect your question with this case?”

“Most certainly. It is the contention of the state that Mrs. Ives realized perfectly that if Mr. Ives decided that he wanted a divorce he would fight vigorously for at least partial custody of his children, whom, as Miss Page was about to tell us, he adored. Moreover, Mrs. Ives had strong religious objections to divorce. It was therefore essential to her to get rid of anyone who threatened her security if she wanted to keep the children. In order to prove this, it is necessary to establish Mr. Ives’s affection. And it ought to be perfectly obvious to anyone that Miss Page is in an excellent position to tell us what that affection was. I maintain that this question is absolutely relevant and material, and that Miss Page is perfectly competent to reply to it.”

“The question may be answered.”

“Exception.”

“Mr. Ives adored the children and they adored him. He was with them constantly.”

“Was Mrs. Ives fond of them?”

“Objection on the same grounds, Your Honour.”

“The question is allowed.”

“Exception.”

“Oh, yes, she was devoted to them.”

“As devoted to them as Mr. Ives?”

“Now, Your Honour——”

Judge Carver eyed the impassioned Lambert with temperate interest. “That seems a fairly broad question, Mr. Farr, calling for a conclusion.”

“Very well, Your Honour, I’ll reframe it. Did she seem as fond of them as Mr. Ives?”

“Oh, quite, I should think—though, of course, Mrs. Ives is not demonstrative.”

“I see—not demonstrative. Cold and reserved, eh?”

Judge Carver’s stern voice cut sharply across Miss Page’s pretty, distressed, appealing murmur: “Mr. Farr, the Court is anxious to give you as much latitude as possible, but we believe that you have gone quite far enough along this particular line.”

“I defer entirely to Your Honour’s judgment. . . . Miss Page, was Mrs. Ives with Mr. Ives when you met him coming into the nursery with the boat in his hand?”

“No, Mrs. Ives had already said good-night to the children before her dinner.”

“Did Mr. Ives go into the nursery before you went downstairs?”

“He went past me into the day nursery, and I have no doubt that he then went into the night nursery.”

“Never mind that. I only want the facts that are in your actual knowledge. There were two nurseries, you say?”

“Yes.”

“Will you be good enough to tell us how they were arranged?”

“The day and night nurseries are in the right wing of the house, on the third floor.”

“What other rooms are on that floor?”

“My room, a bathroom, and a small sewing room.”

“Please tell us what the arrangement would be as you enter the front door.”

“Let me see—when you come in through the door you come into a very large hall that takes up almost all the central portion of the house. The central portion was an old farmhouse, and the wings, that contain all the rooms really, were added by Mrs. Ives. She knocked out the inside structure of the farmhouse and left it just a shell that she made into a big hall three stories high, with galleries around it on the second and third floors leading to the bedroom wings. There were two staircases at the back of the hall, leading to the right and left of the galleries. I’m afraid that I’m not being very clear, but it’s a little confusing.”

“You are being quite clear. Tell us just how the rooms open out as you come through the door.”

“Well, to the right is a small cloakroom and the big living room. It’s very large—it forms the whole ground floor of the right wing in fact. Over it are Mr. and Mrs. Ives’s rooms.”

“Did Mr. and Mrs. Ives occupy separate rooms?”

“Oh, no, there was a large bedroom, and on one side of it was Mrs. Ives’s dressing room and bath, and to the left Mr. Ives’s dressing room and bath. On the third floor were the nurseries and my room. On the left downstairs as you came in was a little flower room.”

“A flower room?”

“A room that was used for arranging flowers, you know. Mrs. Daniel Ives used it a great deal. It had shelves of vases and a sink and a big porcelain-topped table. The downstairs telephone was in there, too, and——”

“Your Honour, may we ask where all this is leading?” Mr. Lambert’s tone was tremulous with impatience.

“You may. The Court was about to make the same inquiry. Is this exhaustive questioning necessary, Mr. Farr?”

“Absolutely necessary, Your Honour. I can assure Mr. Lambert that it is leading to a very interesting conclusion, however distasteful he may find both the path and the goal. I will be as brief as possible, I promise.”

“Very well, you may continue, Miss Page.”

Miss Page raised limpid eyes in appealing deprecation. “I’m so frightfully sorry. I’ve absolutely forgotten where I was.”

“You were telling us that there was a telephone in the flower room.”

“Oh, yes—that is in the first room to the left as you come in. It’s really part of the hall.”

“You mean that it has no door?”

“No, no, it has a door. I simply meant that you came to it before you entered the left wing. It balances the cloakroom on the right-hand side. They’re rather like very large closets, you know, except that they both have windows.”

“What do the windows open on to?”

“The front porch. . . . Shall I go on with the rooms?”

“Please, and as briefly as possible.”

“The first room in the left wing is Mr. Ives’s study. It opens into the dining room. They form the ground floor of the left wing. Above them are Mrs. Daniel Ives’s room and bath and two guest rooms and another bath. Above these on the third floor are the servants’ quarters.”

“How many servants were there?”

“Let me see—there were six, I think, but only the four maids lived in the house.”

“Please tell us who they were.”

“There was the cook, Anna Baker; the waitress, Melanie Cordier; the chambermaid, Katie Brien; and Laura Roberts, Mrs. Ives’s personal maid and seamstress. They had four small rooms in the left wing, third floor. James and Robert MacDonald, the chauffeur and gardener, were brothers and lived in quarters over the garage. Oh, there was a laundress, too, but I don’t remember her name. She didn’t live in the house—only came in four days a week.”

“You have described the entire household?”

“Yes.”

“And the entire layout of the house?”

“Yes—well, with the exception of the service quarters. You reached them through a door at the back of the big hall—kitchen, laundry, servants’ dining room and pantry, which opened also into the dining room. They ran across the back of the house. Do you want me to describe them further?”

“Thanks, no. We can go on with your story now. Did you see anyone but Mr. Ives on your way to the sand pile?”

“Not in the house. I passed Mrs. Daniel Ives on my way through the rose garden. She always used to work there after dinner until it got dark. She asked me as I went by if the children were asleep, and I told her that Mr. Ives was with them.”

“What did you do then?”

“I found the book in the swing by the sand pile and went back across the lawn to the house. As I was starting up the steps, I heard Mrs. Patrick Ives’s voice, speaking from the flower room at the left of the front door. She was speaking very softly, but the window on to the porch was open and I could hear her distinctly.”

“Was she speaking to someone in the room?”

“No, she was telephoning. I think that I’ve already said that the downstairs ’phone is in that room. She was giving a telephone number—Rosemont 200.”

“Were you familiar with that number?”

“Oh, quite. I had called it up for Mrs. Ives several times.”

“Whose number was it, Miss Page?”

“It was Mr. Stephen Bellamy’s telephone number.”

The courtroom pulsed to galvanized attention, its eyes whipping to Stephen Bellamy’s tired, dark face. It was lit with a strange, friendly, reassuring smile, directed straight at Susan Ives’s startled countenance. For a moment she stared back at him soberly, then slowly the colour came back into her parted lips, which curved gravely to mirror that voiceless greeting. For a long moment their eyes rested on each other before they returned to their accustomed guarded inscrutability. As clearly as though they were shouting across the straining faces, those lingering eyes called to each other, “Courage!”

“You say that you could hear Mrs. Ives distinctly, Miss Page?”

“Very distinctly.”

“Will you tell us just what she said?”

“She said”—Miss Page frowned a little in concentration and then went on steadily—“she said, ‘Is that you, Stephen? . . . It’s Sue—Sue Ives. Is Mimi there? . . . How long ago did she leave? . . . Are you sure she went there? . . . No, wait—this is vital. I have to see you at once. Can you get the car here in ten minutes? . . . No, not at the house. Stop at the far corner of the back road. I’ll come through the back gate to meet you. . . . Elliot didn’t say anything to you? . . . No, no, never mind that—just hurry.’ ”

“Is that all that she said?”

“She said good-bye.”

“Nothing else?”

“Nothing else.”

“What did you do then?”

“I turned back from the porch steps and circled the house to the right, going in by the side door and on up to the nursery.”

“Why did you do that?”

“I didn’t want Mrs. Ives to know that I had overheard her conversation. I thought if by any chance she saw me coming in through the side door, it would not occur to her that I could have heard it from there.”

“I see. When you got up to the nursery was Mr. Ives still there?”

“Yes; he came out of the night nursery when he heard me and said that the children were quiet now.”

“Did he say anything else to you?”

“Yes; he still had the boat in his hand, and he said there was something that he wanted to fix about the rudder, and that he’d bring it back in the morning.”

“Did you say anything to him?”

“Yes.”

“Please tell us what you said.”

“I told him that I had just overheard a telephone conversation that his wife was having with Mr. Bellamy, and that I thought he should know about it.”

“Did you tell him about it?”

“Not at that moment. As I was about to do so, Mrs. Ives herself called up from the foot of the stairs to ask Mr. Ives if he still intended to go to the poker game at the Dallases. . . . Shall I go on?”

“Certainly.”

“Mr. Ives said yes, and Mrs. Ives said that in that case she would go to the movies with the Conroys, who had asked her before dinner. Mr. Ives asked her if he couldn’t drop her there, and she said no—that it was only a short walk and that she needed the exercise. She went straight out of the front door, I think. I heard it slam behind her.”

“What did you do then?”

“I said, ‘Your wife has gone to meet Stephen Bellamy.’ ”

“And then what happened?”

“Mr. Ives said, ‘Don’t be a damned little fool.’ ”

Miss Page smiled meekly and appreciatively at the audible ripple from the other side of the railing.

“Did you say anything to that?”

“I simply repeated the telephone conversation.”

“Word for word?”

“Word for word, and when I’d finished, he said, ‘My God, somebody’s told her.’ ”

“I object. Your Honour, I ask that that be stricken from the record!” Lambert’s frenzied clamour filled the room. “What Mr. Ives said——”

“It may be stricken out.”

Judge Carver’s tone was the sternest of rebukes, but the unchastened prosecutor stood staring down at her demure face triumphant for a moment, and then, with a brief expressive gesture toward the defense, turned her abruptly over to their mercies. “That’s all. Cross-examine.”

“No lunch to-day either?”

“No, I’ve got to get these notes off.”

The red-headed girl proudly exhibited an untidy pile of telegraph blanks and a much-bitten pencil. The gold pencil and the black leather notebook had been flung contemptuously out of the cab window on the way back to the boarding house the night before.

“Me too. We’ll finish ’em up here and I’ll get ’em off for you. . . . Here’s your apple.”

The red-headed girl took it obediently, a fine glow invading her. How simply superb to be working there beside a real reporter; such a fire of comradeship and good will burned in her that it set twin fires flaming in her cheeks. The newspaper game! There was nothing like it, absolutely. Her pencil tore across the page in a fever of industry.

It was almost fifty minutes before the reporter spoke again, and then it was only in reply to a question: “What—what did you think of her?”

“Think of whom?”

“Of Kathleen Page.”

“Well, you don’t happen to have a pat of the very best butter about you?”

“Whatever for?”

“To see if it would melt in her mouth.”

“It wouldn’t,” said the red-headed girl; and added fiercely, “I hate her—nasty, hypocritical, unprincipled little toad!”

“Oh, come, come! I hope that you won’t allow any of this to creep into those notes of yours.”

“She probably killed Mimi Bellamy herself,” replied the newest member of the Fourth Estate darkly. “I wouldn’t put it past her for a moment. She——”

“The Court!”

The red-headed girl flounced to her feet, the fires still burning in her cheeks, eyeing Miss Page’s graceful ascent to the witness box with a baleful eye. “I hope she’s headed straight for all the trouble there is,” she remarked between clenched teeth to the reporter.

For the moment it looked as though her wish were about to be gratified.

Mr. Lambert lumbered menacingly toward the witness box, his ruddy face grim and relentless. “You remember a great deal about that evening, don’t you, Miss Page?”

“I have a very good memory.” Miss Page’s voice was the prettiest mixture of pride and humility.

“Do you happen to remember the book that you were reading?”

“Perfectly.”

“Give us the title, please.”

“The book was Cytherea, one of Hergesheimer’s old novels.”

“Was it your own book?”

“No, it came from Mr. Ives’s study.”

“Had he loaned it to you?”

“No.”

“Had Mrs. Ives loaned it to you?”

“No one had loaned it to me; I had simply borrowed it from the study.”

“Oh, you were given the run of the books in Mr. Ives’s study? I see.” Miss Page sat silent, eyeing him steadily, only a slight stain of colour under the clear, pale skin betraying the fact that she had heard him. “Were you?” demanded Mr. Lambert savagely, leaning toward her.

“Was I what?”

“Were you given the run of Mr. Ives’s library?”

“I had never stopped to formulate it in that way. I supposed that there could be no possible objection to taking an occasional book.”

“I see. You regarded yourself as one of the family?”

“Oh, hardly that.”

“Did you take your meals with them?”

“No.”

“Spend the evenings with them?”

“No.”

Miss Page’s fringed eyes were as luminous and steady as ever, but the stain in her cheeks had spread to her throat.

“You resented that fact, didn’t you?”

The prosecutor’s voice whipped out of the brief silence like a sword leaping from the scabbard: “I object to that question. To paraphrase my learned opponent, what possible relevance has Miss Page’s sense of resentment or contentment got to do with the murder of this girl?”

“And to quote my witty adversary’s reply, Your Honour, it has everything to do with it. We propose definitely to attack Miss Page’s credibility. We believe we can show that she detested Mrs. Ives and would not hesitate to do her a disservice.”

“Oh,” said the prosecutor, with much deliberation, “that’s what you propose to show, is it?”

Even the clatter of the judge’s gavel did not cause him to turn his head an inch. He continued to gaze imperturbably at the occupant in the box, who, demure and pensive, returned it unswervingly. In the brief moment occupied by the prosecutor’s skilful intervention the flush had faded entirely. Miss Page looked as cool and tranquil as a little spring in the forest.

“You may answer the question, Miss Page,” said the judge a trifle sternly.

“May I have the question repeated?”

“I asked whether you didn’t resent the fact that you were treated as a servant rather than as a member of the household.”

“It never entered my head that I was being treated as a servant,” said Miss Page gently.

“It never entered your head?”

“Not for a moment.”

“You were perfectly satisfied with your situation in every way?”

“Oh, perfectly.”

“No cause for complaint whatever?”

“None whatever.”

“Miss Page, is this your writing? Don’t trouble to read it—simply tell me whether it is your writing.”

Miss Page bent docilely over the square of pale blue paper. “It looks like my writing.”

“I didn’t ask you whether it looked like it—I asked you if it was your writing.”

“I really couldn’t tell you that. Handwriting can be perfectly imitated, can’t it?”

“Are you cross-examining me or am I cross-examining you?”

Miss Page permitted herself a small, fugitive smile. “I believe that you are supposed to be cross-examining me.”

“Then be good enough to answer my question. To the best of your belief, is this your writing?”

“It is either my writing or a very good imitation of it.”

The outraged Mr. Lambert snatched the innocuous bit of paper from under his composed victim’s nose and proffered it to the clerk of the court as though it were something unclean. “I offer this letter in evidence.”

“Just one moment,” said the prosecutor gently. “I don’t want to waste the Court’s time with a lot of useless objections, but it seems to me that this letter has not yet been identified by Miss Page, and as you are evidently unwilling to let her read it, for some occult reason that I don’t presume to understand, I must object to its being offered in evidence.”

“What does this letter purport to be, Mr. Lambert?” inquired the judge amiably.

Mr. Lambert turned his flaming countenance on the Court. “It purports to be exactly what it is, Your Honour—a letter from Miss Page to her former employer, Mrs. Ives. And I am simply amazed at this hocus-pocus about her not being able to identify her own writing being tolerated for a minute. I——”

“Kindly permit the Court to decide what will be tolerated in the conduct of this case,” remarked the judge, in a voice from which all traces of amiability had been swept as by a cold wind. “What is the date of the purported letter?”

“May 7, 1925.”

“Did you write Mrs. Ives a letter on that date, Miss Page?”

“That’s quite a time ago, Your Honour. I certainly shouldn’t like to make any such statement under oath.”

“Would it refresh your memory if you were to look over the letter?”

“Oh, certainly.”

“I think that you had better let Miss Page look over the letter if you wish to offer it in evidence, Mr. Lambert.”

Once more Mr. Lambert menacingly tendered the blue square, which Miss Page considered in a leisurely and composed manner in no way calculated to tranquillize the storm of indignation that was rocking him. Her perusal completed, she lifted a gracious countenance to the inflamed one before her. “Oh, yes, that is my letter.”

Mr. Lambert snatched it ungratefully. “I again offer this in evidence.”

“No objection,” said the prosecutor blandly.

“Now that you have fortified yourself with its contents, Miss Page, I will ask you to reconcile some of the statements that it contains with some later statements of yours made here under oath this afternoon:

“My dear Mrs. Ives:

“I would like to call your attention to the fact that for the past three nights the food served me has evidently been that discarded by your servants as unfit for consumption. As you do not care to discuss these matters with me personally, I am forced to resort to this means of communication, and I ask you to believe that it is literally impossible to eat the type of meal that has been put before me lately. Boiled mutton which closely resembled boiled dishrags, stewed turnips, and a kind of white jelly that I was later informed was intended to be rice, and a savoury concoction of dried apricots, and sour milk was the menu for yesterday evening. You have made it abundantly clear to me that you regard me as a species of overpaid servant, but I confess that I had not gathered that slow starvation was to be one of my duties.

“Sincerely,

“Kathleen Page.”

“Kindly reconcile your statement that it had never entered your head that you were being treated as a servant with this sentence: ‘You have made it abundantly clear that you regard me as a species of overpaid servant.’ ”

“That was a silly overwrought letter written by me when I was still suffering from the effects of a nervous and physical collapse. I had completely forgotten ever having written it.”

“Oh, you had, had you? Completely forgotten it, eh? Never thought of it from that day to this? Well, just give us the benefit of that wonderful memory of yours once more and tell us the effect of this letter on your relations with Mrs. Ives?”

“It had a very fortunate effect,” said Miss Page, with her prettiest smile. “Mrs. Ives very kindly rectified the situation that I was indiscreet enough to complain of, and the whole matter was cleared up and adjusted most happily.”

“What?” The astounded monosyllable cracked through the courtroom like a rifle shot.

“I said that it was all adjusted most happily,” replied Miss Page sunnily and helpfully, raising her voice slightly.

Actual stupor had apparently descended on her interrogator.

“Miss Page, you make it difficult for me to credit my ears. Is it not the fact that Mrs. Ives sent for you at once on receipt of that note, offered you a month’s wages in lieu of notice, and requested you to leave the following day?”

“Nothing could be farther from the fact.”

Mr. Lambert’s voice seemed about to forsake him at the calm finality of this reply. He opened his mouth twice with no audible results, but at the third effort something closely resembling a roar emerged: “Are you telling me that you did not go on your knees to Mrs. Ives in floods of tears and tell her that it would be signing your death warrant to turn you out then, and implore her to give you another chance?”

“I am telling you,” said Miss Page equably, “that nothing remotely resembling that occurred. Mrs. Ives was extremely regretful and considerate, and there was not a word as to my leaving.”

Apoplexy hovered tentatively over Mr. Lambert’s bulky shoulder. “Do you deny that two days before this murder your insolence had once more precipitated a scene that had resulted in your dismissal, and that you were intending to leave on the following Monday?”

“Most certainly I deny it.”

“A scene that arose from the fact that during Mrs. Ives’s absence in town you ordered the car to take you and a friend of yours from White Plains for a three-hour drive in the country, and that when Mrs. Ives telephoned from town to have the car meet her, as she was returning that afternoon instead of the next day, she was informed that you were out in it and she was obliged to take a taxi?”

“That is not true either.”

“It is not true that you went for a drive with a young man that afternoon?”

“Oh, that is quite true; but I had Mrs. Ives’s permission to do so before she left.”

For a moment Mr. Lambert turned his crimson countenance toward Susan Ives. She had lifted her head and was staring, steadily and contemptuously, at her erstwhile nursery governess, whose limpid eyes moved only from Mr. Lambert to Mr. Farr and back. Even the contempt could not extinguish a frankly diverted twist to her lips at the pat audacity of the gentle replies. Evidently Mr. Lambert could find no comfort there. He turned back to his witness.

“Miss Page, do you know what perjury is?”

“Your Honour——”

Miss Page’s lightning promptitude cut through the prosecutor’s voice: “It’s a demonstrably false statement made under oath, isn’t it?”

“Just wait a minute, please, Miss Page. Your Honour, I respectfully submit that this entire line of cross-examination by Mr. Lambert is extremely objectionable. I have let it go this far because I don’t want to prolong this trial with a lot of unnecessary bickering; but, as far as I can see, he has simply been entertaining the jury with a series of exciting little episodes that there is not a shred of reason to believe are not the offspring of his own fertile imagination. According to Miss Page, they are just exactly that. They are, however, skilfully calculated to prejudice her in the eyes of the jury, and when Mr. Lambert goes so far as to imply in no uncertain manner that Miss Page’s denial of these fantasies is perjury, I can no longer——”

“Your Honour, do you consider this oration for the benefit of the jury proper?” Mr. Lambert’s voice was unsteady with rage.

“I do not, sir. Nor do I consider it the only impropriety that has occurred. I see no legitimate place in cross-examination for a request for a definition of perjury. However, you have received your reply. You may proceed with your cross-examination.”

“Miss Page, when you realized that Mrs. Ives was talking to someone on the telephone, why did you not go on into the house?”

“Because I was interested in what she was saying.”

“So you eavesdropped, eh?”

“Yes.”

“A very pretty, honourable, decent thing to do in your opinion?”

“Oh,” said Miss Page, with her most disarming smile, “I don’t pretend not to be human.”

“Well, that’s very reassuring. Can you tell us why Mrs. Ives didn’t hear you outside on the porch, Miss Page?”

“I wasn’t on the porch. I had just started to come up the steps when I stopped to listen. I had on tennis shoes, which wouldn’t make any noise at all on the lawn.”

“You say that you could hear Mrs. Ives distinctly?”

“Oh, quite.”

“So that anybody else could have heard her distinctly too?”

“Anyone who was standing in that place could have—yes.”

“She was making a secret rendezvous and yet was speaking in a tone sufficiently audible for any passer-by to hear?”

“She probably thought that there would be no passer-by.”

“Your Honour, I ask to have that stricken from the record as deliberately unresponsive.”

“You were not asked as to Mrs. Ives’s thoughts, Miss Page. Mr. Lambert asked you whether any passer-by could not have heard Mrs. Ives’s conversation.”

“Anyone who passed over the route that I did could have heard it perfectly.”

“Mr. Patrick Ives could have heard it?”

“Mr. Patrick Ives was upstairs.”

“That was not my question. I asked you if Patrick Ives could not have heard it quite as readily as you?”

“He could, if he had been there.”

“Miss Page, will you be good enough to repeat that conversation for us once again?”

“The whole thing?”

“Certainly.”

“Mrs. Ives said”—again the little frown of concentration—“she said, ‘Is that you Stephen? . . . It’s Sue—Sue Ives. Is Mimi there? . . . How long ago did she leave? . . . Are you sure she went there? . . . No, wait—this is vital—I have to see you at once. Can you get the car here in ten minutes? . . . No, not at the house. Stop at the far corner of the back road. I’ll come through the back gate to meet you. . . . Elliot hasn’t said anything to you? . . . No, no, never mind that—just hurry. . . . Good-bye.’ ”

Mr. Lambert beamed at her—a ferocious and colossal beam. “Now, that’s very nice—very nice, indeed, Miss Page. Every word pat, eh? Almost as though you’d learned it by heart, shouldn’t you say?”

“That’s probably because I did learn it by heart,” proffered Miss Page helpfully.

The beam forsook Mr. Lambert’s countenance, leaving the ferocity. “Oh, you learned it by heart, did you? Between the front steps and the side door, I suppose?”

“Not exactly. I wrote it down before I went in the side door.”

“You did what?”

“I wrote it down while Mrs. Ives was talking, most of it. The last sentence or so I did just before I came in.”

Mr. Lambert took a convulsive grip on his sagging jaw. “Oh, indeed! Brought back a portable typewriter and a fountain pen and a box of notepaper from the sand pile, too, I suppose?”

Miss Page smiled patiently and politely.

“No; but I had some crayons of the children’s in my sweater pocket.”

“And half a dozen pads, too, no doubt?”

“No, I wrote it on the flyleaf of the book—Cytherea, you know.”

“For what purpose did you write this down?” The voice of Mr. Lambert was the voice of one who has run hard and long toward a receding goal.

“It sounded important to me; I didn’t want to make any mistakes.”

“Quite so. So your story is that you took this information, which you admit you acquired by eavesdropping on the woman you claim had been invariably kind and generous to you, straight to her husband, in the fond expectation of ruining both their lives?”

“Oh, no, indeed—in the expectation of saving them. Mr. Ives had been even kinder to me than Mrs. Ives; I was desperately anxious to help them both.”

“And this was your idea of helping them?”

“It was probably a stupid way,” said Miss Page humbly. “But it was the only one that I could think of. I was afraid they were planning to elope, and I thought that Mr. Ives might be able to stop them. You see, I hadn’t realized then the real significance of the telephone conversation.”

“What real significance, if you please?”

“The fact that someone must have told Mrs. Ives all about Mr. Ives’s affair with Mrs. Bellamy before she went out that night,” said Miss Page softly.

“Your Honour,” said the flagging voice— “Your Honour, I ask that that reply be stricken from the record as unresponsive.”

“The Court does not regard it as unresponsive. You requested Miss Page to give her final interpretation of the telephone conversation and she has given it.”

“May I have an exception, Your Honour?”

“Certainly.”

“Then the story that you expect this jury to believe, Miss Page, is that nothing but affectionate zeal prompted you to spy on this benefactress of yours and to bear the glad tidings of her infidelity to her unsuspecting husband—tidings acquired through a reputed conversation of which you were the sole witness and the self-constituted recorder?”

“I hope that they will believe me,” said Miss Page meekly. For one brief moment her ingenuous eyes rested appealingly on the twelve stolid and inscrutable countenances.

“And I hope that you are unduly optimistic,” said Mr. Lambert heavily. “That is all, Miss Page.”

“Just one moment,” said the prosecutor easily. “Miss Page, when Mr. Lambert asked you whether anyone couldn’t have overheard that conversation, he prevented you from explaining why no one was likely to. Let’s first get that straight. Where was Mrs. Daniel Ives?”

“In the rose garden.”

“That was where she usually went after dinner, wasn’t it?”

“Always, I think. She used to work out there for an hour or so until it got dark, because that was the coolest part of the day.”

“Was the rose garden visible from the study?”

“Quite clearly. A window overlooked the little paved terrace that led down into the rose garden.”

“So that it would have been simple for Mrs. Ives to verify whether Mrs. Daniel Ives was in the garden?”

“Oh, quite.”

“Where were the servants apt to be at that time?”

“They would be having their dinner in the back part of the house—they dined after the family.”

“What about Mr. Patrick Ives?”

“Mrs. Ives knew that he had gone upstairs. He told me that she had been helping him to fasten the little pennant on in the study just before he came up.”

“And she thought that you were upstairs, too, didn’t she?”

“Oh, yes; I was not in the habit of coming down after dinner. I had my meals in the nursery.”

“Did Mr. Ives use the study much—to write or to work in, I mean?”

“I don’t know how much he worked in it; he had quite a collection of technical volumes in it, but I don’t believe that he did much writing, though. He had a very large, flat-topped desk that he used as a kind of work bench.”

“Where he made the boats and dollhouses?”

“Yes.”

“Kept his tools and materials?”

“Yes.”

“Was that desk visible from the door?”

“Yes; it was directly opposite the door into the hall.”

“Would a person going from the flower room to the foot of the nursery stairs pass it?”

“They could not very well avoid doing so.”

“Would the contents of the top of the desk be visible from the doorway?”

“Oh, surely. The study is not a large room.”

The prosecutor made two strides toward the witness box. Something small and dark and bright glinted for a moment in his hand. “Miss Page, have you ever seen this knife before?”

Very delicately Miss Page lifted it in her slender fingers, eyeing it gravely and fastidiously. “Yes,” she said quietly.

A little wind seemed to blow suddenly through the courtroom—a little, cold, ominous wind.

“Where?”

“On the desk in Mr. Patrick Ives’s study on the afternoon of the nineteenth of June, 1926.”

In a voice almost as gentle as her own, the prosecutor said, “That will be all, Miss Page. You may go.”

And as lightly, as softly as she had come, Miss Page slipped from the witness box and was gone.

The second day of the Bellamy trial was over.

Chapter III

“Oh, I knew I would be—I knew it!” moaned the red-headed girl crawling abjectly over three irritated and unhelpful members of the Fourth Estate, dropping her pencil, dropping her notebook, dropping a pair of gray gloves and a squirrel scarf, and lifting a stricken face to the menacing countenance of Ben Potts, king of court criers. “I’ve been late for every single thing that’s happened since I got to this wretched town. It’s like Alice in Wonderland—you have to run like mad to keep in the same place. Who’s talking? What’s happened?”

“Well, you seem to be doing most of the talking,” replied the real reporter unkindly. “And about all that’s happened has been fifteen minutes of as hot legal brimstone and sulphur as you’d want to hear in a thousand years, emitted by the Mephistophelean Farr, who thinks it would be nice to have a jackknife in evidence, and the inflammable Lambert, who thinks it would be horrid. Mr. Lambert was mistaken, the knife is in, and they’re just opening a few windows to clear the air. Outside of that, everything’s lovely. Not a soul’s confessed, the day is young, and Mr. Douglas Thorne is just taking the stand. Carry on!”

The red-headed girl watched the lean, bronzed gentleman with sandy hair and a look of effortless distinction with approval. Nice eyes, nice hands.

“Mr. Thorne, what is your occupation?”

Nice voice: “I am a member of the New York Stock Exchange.”

“Are you a relative of the defendant, Susan Ives?”

“Her elder brother, I’m proud to say.”

His pleasant eyes smiled down at the slight figure in the familiar tweed suit, and for the first since she had come to court Sue Ives smiled back freely and spontaneously— a friendly, joyous smile, brilliant as a banner.

The prosecutor lifted a warning hand. “Please stick to the issue, Mr. Thorne, and we’ll take your affection for your sister for granted. Are you the proprietor of the old Thorne estate, Orchards?”

“Yes.”

“The sole proprietor?”

“The sole proprietor.”

“Why did your sister not share in that estate, Mr. Thorne?”

“My father no longer regarded my sister as his heir after she married Patrick Ives. He took a violent dislike to Mr. Ives from the first, and it was distinctly against his wishes that Sue married him.”

“Did you share this dislike?”

“For Patrick? Oh, no. At the time I hardly knew him, and later I became extremely fond of him.”

“You still are?”

The pleasant gray eyes, suddenly grave, looked back unswervingly into the hot blue fire of the prosecutor’s. “That is a difficult question to answer categorically. Perhaps the most accurate reply that I can give is that at present I am reserving an opinion on my brother-in-law and his conduct.”

“That’s hardly a satisfactory reply, Mr. Thorne.”

“I regret it; it is an honest one.”

“Well, let’s put it this way: You are devoted to your sister, aren’t you, Mr. Thorne?”

“Very deeply devoted.”

“You admit that her happiness is dear to you?”

“I don’t particularly care for the word ‘admit’; I state willingly that her happiness is very dear to me.”

“And you would do anything to secure it?”

“I would do a great deal.”

“Anything?”

Douglas Thorne leaned forward over the witness box, his face suddenly stern. “If by ‘anything,’ Mr. Farr, you mean would I commit murder, my reply is no.”

Judge Carver’s gavel fell with a crash. “That is an entirely uncalled for conclusion, Mr. Thorne. It may be stricken from the record.”

“Kindly reply to my question, Mr. Thorne. Would you not do anything in order to secure your sister’s happiness?”

“No.”

Once more Sue Ives’s smile flew like a banner.

“Mr. Thorne, did your sister ever speak to you about her first two or three years in New York?”

“I have a vague general impression that we discussed certain aspects of it, such as living conditions there at the time, and——”

“Vague general impressions aren’t what we want. You have no specific knowledge of where they were or what they were doing at the time?”

“I can recall nothing at the moment.”

“Your sister, to whom you are so devoted, never once communicated with you during that time?”

“I received a letter from her about a week after she left Rosemont, stating that she thought that for the time being it would be better to sever all connections with Rosemont, but that her affection for all of us was unchanged.”

“I haven’t asked you for the contents of the letter. Is that the only communication that you received from her during those years in New York?”

“With the exception of Christmas cards, I heard nothing more for a little over two years. Then she began to write fairly regularly.”

“Mr. Thorne, were you on the estate of Orchards at any time on June 19, 1926?”

“I was.”

There was a sudden stir and ripple throughout the court room. “Now!” said the ripple. “Now! At last!”

“At what time?”

“I couldn’t state the exact time at which I arrived, but I believe that it must have been shortly after nine in the evening.”

The ripples broke into little waves. Nine o’clock—nine——

“And at what time did you leave?”

“That I can tell you exactly. I left the main house at Orchards at exactly ten minutes to ten.”

The ripples broke into little waves. Ten o’clock—ten——

“Silence!” banged Judge Carver’s gavel.

“Silence!” sang Ben Potts.

“Please tell us what you were doing at Orchards during that hour.”

“It was considerably less than an hour. Mr. Conroy had telephoned me shortly before dinner, asking me to leave the keys at the cottage, which I gladly agreed to do, as I had been intending for some time to get some old account books I had left in my desk at the main house. I didn’t notice the exact time at which I left Lakedale, but it must have been about half-past eight, as we dine at half-past seven, and I smoked a cigar before I started. I drove over at a fair rate of speed—around thirty-five miles an hour, say—and went straight to the main house.”

“You did not stop at the gardener’s cottage?”

“No; I——”

“Yet you pass it on your way from the lodge to the house, don’t you?”

“No, coming from Lakedale I use the River Road; the first entrance off the road leads straight from the back of the place to the main house; the lodge gates are at the opposite end of the place on the main road from Rosemont. Shall I go on?”

“Certainly.”

“It was just beginning to get dark when I arrived, and the electricity was shut off, so I didn’t linger in the house—just procured the papers and cleared out. When I got back to the car, I decided to leave it there and walk over to the cottage and back. It was only a ten-minute walk each way, and it was a fine evening. I started off——”

“You say that it was dark at the time?”

“It was fairly dark when I started, and quite dark as I approached the cottage.”

“Was there a moon?”

“I don’t think so; I remember noticing the stars on the way home, but I am quite sure that there was no moon at that time.”

“You met no one on your way to the cottage?”

“No one at all.”

“You saw nothing to attract your attention?”

“No.”

“And heard nothing?”

“Yes,” said Douglas Thorne, as quietly and unemphatically as he had said no.

The prosecutor took a quick step forward. “You say you heard something? What did you hear?”

“I heard a woman scream.”

“Nothing else?”

“Yes, a second or so afterward I heard a man laugh.”

“A man laugh?” the prosecutor’s voice was rough with incredulity. “What kind of a laugh?”

“I don’t know how to characterize it,” said Mr. Thorne simply. “It was an ordinary enough laugh, in a rather deep masculine voice. It didn’t strike me as in any way extraordinary.”

“It didn’t strike you as extraordinary to hear a woman scream and a man laugh in a deserted place at that hour of the night?”

“No, frankly, it didn’t. My first reaction was that the caretaker and his wife had returned from their vacation earlier than we had expected them; or if not, that possibly some of the young people from the village were indulging in some romantic trespassing—that’s not unknown, I may state.”

“You heard no words? No voices?”

“Oh, no; I was about three hundred feet from the cottage at the time that I heard the scream.”

“You did not consider that that sound was the voice of a woman raised in mortal terror?”

“No,” said Douglas Thorne. “Naturally, if I had, I should have done something to investigate. I was somewhat startled when I first heard it, but the laugh following so promptly completely reassured me. A scream of terror, a scream of pain, a scream of surprise, a scream of more or less perfunctory protest—I doubt whether anyone could distinguish between them at three hundred feet. I certainly couldn’t.”

The prosecutor shook his head irritably; he seemed hardly to be listening to this lucid exposition. “You’re quite sure about the laugh—you heard it distinctly?”

“Oh, perfectly distinctly.”

“Could you see the cottage from where you stood at the time?”

“No; the bend in the road and the high shrubbery hide it completely until you are almost on top of it.”

“Then you don’t know whether it was lighted when you heard the scream?”

“No; I only know that it was dark when I reached it a moment or so later.”

“What did you do when you reached the cottage?”

“I noticed that it was dark as I ran up the steps, but on the off chance that it might have been the gardener that I had heard, I rang the bell half mechanically and tried the door, as I wanted to explain to him about Mr. Conroy’s visit in the morning. The door was locked.”

“You had the key on the ring, hadn’t you?”

“Yes; but I had no reason in the world for going in if the gardener wasn’t there.”

“You heard no sound from within?”

“Not a sound.”

“And nothing from without?”

“Everything was perfectly quiet.”

“No one could have passed you at any time?”

“Oh, certainly not.”

“Mr. Thorne, would it have been possible for anyone in the cottage to have heard you approaching?”

“I think that it might have been possible. The night was very still, and the main drive down which I was walking is of crushed gravel. The little drive off it that circles the house is of dirt; I don’t know how clear footsteps would be on that, but of course anyone would have heard me going up the steps. I have a vague impression, too, that I was whistling.”

“Could anyone have been concealed in the shrubbery about the house?”

“Oh, quite easily. The shrubbery is very high all about it.”

“But you noticed no one?”

“No one.”

“What did you do after you had decided that the house was empty?”

“I put the keys under the mat, as had been agreed, and returned to the main house. As I got into my roadster, I looked at my wrist watch by one of the headlights. It was exactly ten minutes to ten.”

“What caused you to consult your watch?”

“I’d had a vague notion that I might run over to see my sister for a few minutes, as I was in the neighbourhood, but when I discovered that it was nearly ten, I changed my mind and went straight back to Lakedale.”

“Mr. Thorne, you must have been perfectly aware when the news of the murder came out the next morning that you had information in your possession that would have been of great value to the state. Why did you not communicate it at once?”

Douglas Thorne met the prosecutor’s gaze steadily, with a countenance free of either defiance or concern. “Because, frankly, I had no desire whatever to be involved, however remotely, in a murder case. I was still debating my duty in the matter two days later, when my sister and Mr. Bellamy were arrested, and the papers announced that the state had positive information that the murder was committed between quarter to nine and quarter to ten on the night of the nineteenth. That seemed to render my meagre observations quite valueless, and I accordingly kept them to myself.”

“And I suppose you fully realize now that you have put yourself in a highly equivocal position by doing so?”

“Why, no, Mr. Farr; I may be unduly obtuse, but I assure you that I realize nothing of the kind.”

“Let me endeavour to enlighten you. According to your own story, you must have heard that scream between nine-thirty and twenty-five minutes to ten, granting that you spent three or four minutes on the cottage porch and took ten minutes to walk back to the house. According to you, you arrived at the scene of action within three minutes of that scream, to find everything dark, silent and orderly. It is the state’s contention that somewhere in that orderly darkness, practically within reach of your outstretched hand, stood your idolized sister. Quite a coincidence, isn’t it?”

“It is quite a coincidence that that should be your contention,” remarked Douglas Thorne, a dangerous glint in his eye. “But I know of no scandal attached to coincidence.”

“Well, this particular type of coincidence has landed more than one man in jail as accessory after the fact,” remarked the prosecutor grimly. “What time did you get back to Lakedale that night?”

“At ten-thirty.”

“Did anyone see you?”

“My wife was on the porch when I arrived.”

“Anyone else?”

“No.”

“That’s all, Mr. Thorne. Cross-examine.”

Mr. Lambert approached the witness box at almost a prance, his broad countenance smouldering with ill-concealed excitement. “Mr. Thorne, I’ll trouble you with only two questions. My distinguished adversary has asked you whether you noticed anything unusual in the neighbourhood of the cottage. I ask you whether in that vicinity you saw at any time a car—an automobile?”

“I saw no sign of a car.”

“No sign of a small Chevrolet, for instance—of Mr. Bellamy’s, for instance?”

“No sign of any car at all.”

“Thank you, Mr. Thorne. That will be all.”

Over Mr. Lambert’s exultant carol rose a soft tumult of whispers. “There goes the state’s story!” “Score 100 for the defense!” “Oh, boy, did you get that? He’s fixed the time of the murder and run Sue and Steve off the scene all in one move.” “The hand is quicker than the eye.” “Look at Farr’s face; that boy’s got a mean eye——”

“Silence!” sang Ben Potts.

The prosecutor advanced to within six inches of the witness box, his eyes contracted to pin points. “You assure us that you saw no car, Mr. Thorne?”

“I do.”

“But you are not able to assure us that no car was there?”

“Obviously, if a car was there, I should have seen it.”

“Oh, no, believe me, that’s far from obvious! If a car had been parked to the rear of the cottage on the little circular road, would you have seen it?”

“I should have seen its lights.”

“And if its lights had been turned out?”

“Then,” said Douglas Thorne slowly, “I should probably not have seen it.”

“You were not in the rear of the cottage at any time, were you?”

“No.”

“Then it is certain that you would not have seen it, isn’t it?”

“I have told you that under those circumstances I do not believe I should have seen it.”

“If a car had been parked on the main driveway between the lodge gates and the cottage, with its lights out, you would not have seen that either, would you, Mr. Thorne?”

“Possibly not.”

“And you don’t for a moment expect to have twelve level-headed, intelligent men believe that a pair of murderers would park their car in a clearly visible position, with all its lights burning for any passer-by to remark, while they accomplished their purpose?”

“I object to that question!” panted Mr. Lambert. “I object! It calls for a conclusion, Your Honour, and is highly——”

“The question is overruled.”

“Very well, Mr. Thorne; that will be all.”

Mr. Lambert, who had been following these proceedings with a woebegone countenance from which the recent traces of elation had been washed as though by a bucket of unusually cold water, pulled himself together valiantly. “Just one moment, Mr. Thorne; the fact is that you didn’t see a car there, isn’t it?”

“That is most certainly the fact.”

“Thank you; that will be all.”

“And the fact is,” remarked the grimly smiling prosecutor, “that it might perfectly well have been there without your seeing it, isn’t it?”

“Yes, that also is the fact.”

“That will be all. Call Miss Flora Biggs.”

The prosecutor’s grim little smile still lingered.

“Miss Flora Biggs!”

Flora Biggs might have been a pretty girl ten years ago, before that fatal heaviness had crept from sleazy silk ankles to the round chin above the imitation pearls. Everything about Miss Biggs was imitation—an imitation fluff of something that was meant to be fur on the plush coat that was meant to be another kind of fur; an imitation rose of a washed-out magenta trying to hide itself in the masquerading collar; pearls the size of large bone buttons peeping out from too golden hair; an arrow of false diamonds catching the folds of the purple velvet toque that was not quite velvet; nervous fingers in suède gloves that were rather a bad grade of cotton clutching at a snakeskin bag of stenciled cloth—a poor, cheap, shoddy imitation of what the well-dressed woman will wear. And yet in those small insignificant features that should have belonged to a pretty girl, in those round china-blue eyes, staring forlornly out of reddened rims, there was something candid and touching and appealing. For out of those reddened eyes peered the good shy little girl in the starched white dress brought down to entertain the company—the good, shy little girl whose name had been Florrie Biggs. And little Florrie Biggs had been crying.

“Where do you live, Miss Biggs?”

“At 21 Maple Street, Rosemont.” The voice was hardly more than a whisper.

“Just a trifle louder, please; we all want to hear you. Did you know Madeleine Bellamy, Miss Biggs?”

The tears that had been lurking behind the round blue eyes welled over abruptly, leaving little paths behind them down the heavily powdered cheeks. “Yes, sir, I did.”

“Intimately?”

“Yes, sir. I guess so. Ever since I was ten. We went to school and high school together; she was quite a little younger than me, but we were best friends.”

The tears rained down quietly and Miss Biggs brushed them impatiently away with the clumsy gloved fingers.

“You were fond of her?”

“Yes, sir, I was awful fond of her.”

“Did you see much of her during the years of 1916 and ’17?”

“Yes, sir; I just lived three houses down the block. I used to see her every day.”

“Did you know Patrick Ives too?”

“Yes, sir; I knew him pretty well.”

“Was there much comment on his attention to your friend Madeleine during the year 1916?”

“Everyone knew they had a terrible case on each other,” said Miss Biggs simply.

“Were they supposed to be engaged?”

“No, sir, I don’t know as they were; but everyone sort of thought they would be.”

“Their relations were freely discussed amongst their friends?”

“They surely were.”

“Did you ever discuss the affair with either Mr. Ives or Mrs. Bellamy?”

“Not ever with Pat, I didn’t, but Mimi used to talk about it quite a lot.”

“Do you remember what she said during the first conversation?”

“Well, I think that the first time was when we had a terrible fight about it.” At memory of that far-off quarrel Florrie’s blue eyes flooded and brimmed over again. “We’d been on a picnic and Pat and Mimi got separated from the rest of us, and by and by we went home without them; and it was awfully late that night when they got back, and I told Mimi that she ought to be carefuller how she went around with a fellow like Pat Ives, and she got terrible mad and told me that she knew what she was doing and she could look after herself, and that I was just jealous and to mind my own business. Oh, she talked to me something fierce.”

Miss Biggs’s voice broke on a great sob, and suddenly the crowded courtroom faded. . . . It was a hot July night in a village street and the shrill, angry voices of the two girls filled the air. Once more Mimi Dawson, insolent in her young beauty, was telling little Florrie Biggs to keep her small snub nose out of other people’s affairs. All the injured woe of that far-off night was in her sob.

“Did she speak of him again?”

“Oh, yes, sir, she certainly did. She used to speak of him most of the time—after we made it up again, that is.”

“Did she tell you whether they were expecting to be married?”

“Not in just so many words, she didn’t, but she used to sort of discuss it a lot, like whether it would be a good thing to do, and if they’d be happy in Rosemont or whether New York wouldn’t work better—you know, just kind of thinking it over.”

Mr. Farr looked gravely sympathetic. “Exactly. Nothing more definite than that?”

“Well, I remember once she said that she’d do it in a minute if she were sure that Pat had it in him to make good.”

“And did you gather from that and other remarks of hers that it was she who was holding back and Mr. Ives who was urging marriage?”

“Oh, yes, sir,” said Miss Biggs, and added earnestly, “I think she meant me to gather that.”

There was a warm, friendly little ripple of amusement, at which she lifted startled blue eyes.

“Quite so. Now when Mr. Ives went to France, Miss Biggs, what did your circle consider the state of affairs between them to be?”

“We all thought they was sure to get married,” said Miss Biggs, and added in a low voice, “Some of us thought maybe they was married already.”

“And just what made you think that?”

Miss Biggs moved restlessly in her chair. “Oh, nothing special, I guess; only they seemed so awfully gone on each other, and Pat was always hiring flivvers to take her off to Redfield and—and places. They never went much with the crowd any more, and lots of people were getting married then—you know, war marriages——” The soft, hesitant voice trailed off into silence.

“I see. Just what was Mr. Ives’s reputation with your crowd, Miss Biggs? Was he a steady, hard-working young man?”

“He wasn’t so awfully hard-working, I guess.”

The distressed murmur was not too low to reach Patrick Ives’s ears, evidently; for a brief moment his white face was lit with the gayest of smiles, impish and endearing. It faded, and the eyes that had been suddenly blue faded, too, back to their frozen gray.

“Was he popular?”

“Oh, everyone liked him fine,” said Miss Biggs eagerly. “He was the most popular fellow in Rosemont, I guess. He was a swell dancer, and he certainly could play on the ukulele and skate and do perfectly killing imitations and—and everything.”

“Then why did you warn your friend against consorting with this paragon, Miss Biggs?”

“Sir?”

“Why did you tell Mimi Dawson that she shouldn’t play around too much with Pat Ives?”

“Oh—oh, well, I guess, like she said, I was just foolish and it wasn’t none of my business.”

“You said, a ‘fellow like Pat Ives,’ Miss Biggs. What kind of a fellow did you mean? The kind of a fellow who played the ukulele? Or did he play something else?”

“Well—well, he played cards some—poker, you know, and red dog and—well, billiards, you know.”

“He gambled, didn’t he?”

“Now, Your Honour,” remarked Mr. Lambert heavily, “is this to be permitted to go on indefinitely? I have deliberately refrained from objecting to a most amazing line of questions——”

“The Court is inclined to agree with you, Mr. Lambert. Is it in any way relevant to the state’s case whether Mr. Ives played the ukulele or the organ, Mr. Farr?”

“It is quite essential to the state’s case to prove that Mr. Ives has a reckless streak in his character that led directly to the murder of Madeleine Bellamy, Your Honour. We contend that just as in those months before the war in the village of Rosemont, so in the year of 1926, he was gambling with his own safety and happiness and honour, and as in those days, with the happiness and honour and safety of a woman as well—with the same woman with whom he was renewing the affair broken off by a trick of fate nine years before. We contend——”

“Yes. Well, the Court contends that your questioning along these lines has been quite exhaustive enough, and that furthermore it doubts its relevance to the present issue. You may proceed.”

“Very well, Your Honour. . . . When Mr. Ives returned in 1919, were you still seeing much of Miss Dawson?”

“No, sir,” said Miss Biggs in a low voice. “Not any hardly.”

“Why was that?”

“Well, mostly it was because she was starting to go with another crowd—the country-club crowd, you know. She was all the time with Mr. Farwell.”

“Exactly. Did you renew your intimacy at any later period?”

“No, sir, not ever.”

Once more the cotton fingers were busy with the treacherous tears, falling for Mimi, lost so many years ago—lost again, most horribly, after those unhappy years.

“Thank you, Miss Biggs. That will be all. Cross-examine.”

Mr. Lambert’s heavy face, turned to those drowned and terrified eyes, was almost paternal. “You say that for many years there was no intimacy between you and Mrs. Bellamy, Miss Biggs?”

“No, sir, there wasn’t—not any.”

“Mrs. Bellamy never took you into her confidence as to her feelings toward Mr. Ives after her marriage?”

“She never took me into her confidence about anything at all—no, sir.”

“You never saw her after her marriage?”

“Oh, yes, I did see her. I went there two or three times for tea.”

“Everything was pleasant?”

“She was very polite and pleasant—yes, sir.”

“But there was no tendency to confide in you?”

“I didn’t ask her to confide in me,” said Miss Biggs. “I didn’t ask her for anything at all—not anything.”

“But if there had been anything to confide, it would have been quite natural to confide in you—girls generally confide in their best friend, don’t they?”

“I guess so.”

“And as far as you know, there were no guilty relations between Mrs. Bellamy and Mr. Ives at the time of her death?”

“I didn’t know even whether she saw Mr. Ives,” said Florrie Biggs.

Mr. Lambert beamed gratefully. “Thank you, Miss Biggs. That’s all.”

“Just one moment more, please.” The prosecutor, too, was looking as paternal as was possible under the rather severe limitations of his saturnine countenance. “Mr. Lambert was just asking you if it would have been natural for her to confide in you, as girls generally confide in their best friends. At the time of this murder, and for many years previous, you weren’t Mrs. Bellamy’s best friend, were you, Miss Biggs?”

“No, sir, I guess I wasn’t.”

“There was very little affection and intimacy between you, wasn’t there?”

“I don’t know what you call between us,” said Miss. Biggs, and the pretty, common, swollen face was suddenly invested with dignity and beauty. “I loved her better than anyone I knew. She was the only best friend I ever had—ever.”

And swept by the hunger in that quiet and humble voice, the courtroom was suddenly empty of everyone but two little girls, warm cheeked, bright eyed, gingham clad—a sleek pig-tailed head and a froth of bright curls locked together over an inkstained desk. Best friends—four scuffed feet flying down the twilight street on roller skates—two mittened paws clutching each other under the shaggy robe of the bell-hung sleigh—a slim arm around a chubby waist on the hay cart—decorous, mischievous eyes meeting over the rims of the frosted glasses of sarsaparilla while brown-stockinged legs swung free of the tall drug-store stools—a shrill voice calling down the street in the sweet-scented dusk, “Yoo-hoo, Mimi! Mimi, c’mon out and play.” Mimi, Mimi, lying so still with red on your white lace dress, come on out and——

“Thank you, Miss Biggs: that’s all.”

She stumbled a little on the step of the witness box, brushed once more at her eyes with impatient fingers and was gone.

“Call Mrs. Daniel Ives.”