“A friend of mine—a young lady.”
“What was the name of this young woman?”
“Is it necessary to give her name? I hope—I hope with all my heart—that that will not be necessary.” The low, urgent, unhappy voice stumbled in its intensity. “My companion was quite a young girl. We both realize now that we committed a grave indiscretion, but I shall never forgive myself if my criminal stupidity has involved her.”
“I am afraid that we shall have to have her name.”
“I am a married man,” said Mr. Phipps, in a clear voice that did not stumble. “I am placing this information before the Court at no small sacrifice to myself. It seems to me to place too heavy a penalty on my decision to come forward at this moment if you ask me to involve another by so doing. The girl who was with me that evening was one of my pupils; she is at present engaged to a young man to whom she is entirely devoted; publicity of the type that this means is in every way abhorrent to her. I request most urgently that she shall not be exposed to it.”
“Mr. Phipps,” said Judge Carver gravely, “you have been permitted to take the stand at your own request. It is highly desirable that any information, of the importance that you have implied that in your possession to be, should be as fully corroborated as possible. It is therefore essential that we should have the name of this young woman.”
“Her name is Sally Dunne,” said Mr. Phipps.
“Is she also prepared to take the stand?”
“She is prepared to do whatever is essential to prevent a miscarriage of justice. She is naturally extremely reluctant to take the stand.”
“Is she in court?”
“She is.”
“Miss Dunne will be good enough not to leave the courtroom without the Court’s permission. You may proceed, Mr. Phipps.”
“We arrived at Orchards at a little after eight,” said Mr. Phipps. “Miss Dunne took the half-past-seven bus from Rosemont, left it a short distance beyond Orchards, and walked back to the spot where I had arranged to meet her, just inside the gate. We did not arrive together, as I was apprehensive that it might cause a certain amount of gossip if we were seen together.”
“How had you come to choose Orchards, Mr. Phipps?”
“Miss Dunne had on several occasions commented on the beauty of the place and expressed a desire to see it more thoroughly, and it was in order to gratify that desire that the party was planned. As I say, we met at the gate and walked on up the drive past the lodge and the little driveway that leads to the gardener’s cottage to a small summerhouse, about five hundred feet beyond the cottage itself. It contained a little furniture—a table and some chairs and benches—and it was there that we decided to have our supper. Miss Dunne had brought a luncheon box with her containing fruit and sandwiches, and we spread it on the table and began to eat. Neither of us was particularly hungry, however, and we decided to keep what remained of the food—about half the contents of the box, I think—in case we wanted it later, and to do some reading before it got too dark to see. I had brought with me the Idylls of the King, with the intention of reading it aloud.”
“The book is of no importance, Mr. Phipps.”
“No,” said Mr. Phipps, in a tone of slight surprise. “No, I suppose not. You are probably quite right. Well, in any case, we read for quite a while, until it began to get too dark to see, and after that we sat there conversing.”
The fluent voice with its slightly meticulous pronunciation paused, and Lambert moved impatiently. “And then, Mr. Phipps?”
“Yes. I was trying to recollect precisely what it was that caused us to move from the summerhouse. I think that it was Miss Dunne who suggested that it was rather close and stuffy there, because of the fact that the structure was smothered in vines; she asked if there wasn’t somewhere cooler that we could go to sit. I said: ‘There’s the gardener’s cottage. We might try the veranda there.’ You could just see the roof of it through the trees. I pointed it out to her, and we started—”
“You were familiar with the layout of the estate?”
“Oh, quite. That was one of the principal reasons why we had gone there. I had once done some tutoring in Latin and physics with Mr. Thorne’s younger son Charles—the one who was killed in the war. We had been in the habit of using the summerhouse, which was his old playhouse, as a schoolroom.”
“That was some time ago?”
“About fifteen years ago—sixteen perhaps. I had just graduated from college myself, and Charles Thorne was going to Princeton that fall.”
“But you still remembered your way about?”
“Oh, perfectly. I was about to say that we did not approach it from the main drive, but cut across the lawns, pushed through the shrubbery at the back and came up to it from the rear. We had just reached the little dirt drive back of the cottage, and were perhaps a hundred feet away from the house itself, when we heard voices, and Miss Dunne exclaimed: ‘There’s someone in the cottage. Look, the side window is lighted.’ I was considerably startled, as I had made inquiries about the gardener and knew that he was in Italy.
“I stood still for a moment, debating what to do next, when one of the voices in the cottage was suddenly raised, and a woman said quite clearly, ‘You wouldn’t dare to touch me—you wouldn’t dare!’ Someone laughed and there was a little scuffling sound, and a second or so after that a scream—a short, sharp scream—and the sound of something falling with quite a clatter, as though a chair or a table had been overturned.
“I was in rather a nervous and overwrought state of mind myself that evening, and before
