“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 .”
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.
III
“Oh, I knew I would be—I knew it!” moaned the redheaded 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
