and nail indeed, yet
perhaps with more asperity than conviction, and certainly at times upon
points which were hardly worth the fighting. Yet, on the Friday
afternoon, when her counsel at last played his masterstroke, and,
taking advantage of the then new Act, put the prisoner herself in the
witness-box, it was done with the air of a man who is throwing up his
case. The truth could be seen at a glance at the clean-cut, handsome,
but too expressive profile of the crushing cross-examiner of female
witnesses and insolent foe to the police. As it had been possible to
predict, from the mere look with which he had risen to his feet, the
kind of cross-examination in store for each witness called by the
prosecution, so it was obvious now that his own witness had come forward
from her own wilful perversity and in direct defiance of his advice.

It was a dismal afternoon, and the witness-box at the Old Bailey is so
situated that evidence is given with the back to the light; thus, though
her heavy veil was raised at last, and it could be seen that she was
very pale, it was not yet that Rachel Minchin afforded a chance to the
lightning artists of the half-penny press, or even to the students of
physiognomy behind the man with the white hair. This listener did not
lean forward an inch; the questions were answered in so clear a voice as
to render it unnecessary. Yet it was one of these questions, put by her
own counsel, which caused the white-headed man to clap a sudden hand to
his ear, and to incline that ear as though the answer could not come
without some momentary hesitation or some change of tone. Rachel had
told sadly but firmly of her final quarrel with her husband,
incidentally, but without embarrassment, revealing its cause. A neighbor
was dangerously ill, whom she had been going to nurse that night, when
her husband met her at the door and forbade her to do so.

"Was this neighbor a young man?"

"Hardly more than a boy," said Rachel, "and as friendless as ourselves."

"Was your husband jealous of him?"

"I had no idea of it until that night."

"Did you find it out then?"

"I did, indeed!"

"And where had your husband been spending the evening?"

"I had no idea of that either--until he told me he had been watching the
house--and why!"

Though the man was dead, she could not rid her voice of its scorn; and
presently, with bowed head, she was repeating his last words to her. A
cold thrill ran through the court.