otherwise impossible to credit them. Fear lends
it to them."

"Yes," Thresk interrupted quickly, "but don't you see, Mr. Pettifer, that
you are implying the existence of an emotion in Mrs. Ballantyne which the
facts prove her to have been without--fear, panic? She was found quietly
asleep in her bed by the ayah when she came to call her in the morning.
There's no doubt of that. The ayah was never for a moment shaken upon
that point. The pyschology of crime is a curious and surprising study,
Mr. Pettifer, but I know of no case where terror has acted as a
sleeping-draught."

Mr. Pettifer smiled and turned altogether away from the question.

"It is, as I said, a minor point, and perhaps one from which any
sort of inference would be unsafe. It interested me. I lay no great
stress upon it."

He dismissed the point carelessly, to the momentary amusement of Henry
Thresk. The art of slipping away from defeat had been practised with
greater skill. Thresk lost some part of his apprehension but none of his
watchfulness.

"Now, however, we come to something very different," said Pettifer,
hitching himself a little closer to his table and fixing his eyes upon
Thresk. "The case for the prosecution ran like this: Stephen Ballantyne
was, though a man of great ability, a secret drunkard who humiliated his
wife in public and beat her in private. She went in terror of him. She
bore on more than one occasion the marks of his violence; and upon that
night in Chitipur, perhaps in a panic and very likely under extreme
provocation, she snatched up her rook-rifle and put an end to the whole
bad business."

"Yes," Thresk agreed, "that was the case for the Crown."

"Yes, and throughout the sitting at the Stipendiary's inquiry before you
came upon the scene that theory was clearly developed."

"Yes."

Thresk's confidence vanished as quickly as it had come. He realised
whither Pettifer's questions were leading. There was a definitely weak
link in his story and Pettifer had noticed it and was testing it.

"Now," the solicitor continued--"and this is the important point--what
was the answer to that charge foreshadowed by the defence during those
days before you appeared?"

Thresk answered the question quickly, if answer it could be called.

"The defence had not formulated any answer. I came forward before the
case for the Crown finished."

"Quite so. But Mrs. Ballantyne's counsel did cross-examine the witnesses
for the prosecution--