Sunset came early at that season. Dark fell and the electric bulbs made their mimic day, but no one left the room. The outcome seemed a foregone conclusion. The jurymen no longer gazed at the prisoner, and when they looked at one another, it was with grim understanding. As the last witness for the State stepped down and the prosecutor rested, the judge glanced at the clock.
"There is a bare half-hour," he said tentatively. "Perhaps the defense would prefer not to open testimony till to-morrow."
Felder had risen. He saw his opportunity--to bring out sharply a contrasting point in the prisoner's favor, the one circumstance, considered apart, pointing toward innocence rather than guilt--to leave this for the jury to take with them, to off-set by its effect the weight of the evidence that had been given.
"I will proceed, if your Honor pleases," he said, and amid a rustle of surprise and interest called Jessica to the stand.
As she went forward to the witness chair, she put back the shielding veil, and her face, pale as bramble-bloom under her red-bronze hair, made an appealing picture. A cluster of white carnations was pinned to her coat and as she passed Harry she bent and laid one in his hand. The slight act, not lost upon the spectators, called forth a sibilant flutter of sympathy. For it wore no touch of designed effect; its impulse was as pure and unmistakable as its meaning.
Harry had started uncontrollably as she rose, for he had had no inkling of the lawyer's intention, and a flush darkened his cheek at the cool touch of the flower. But this faded to a settled pallor, as under Felder's grave questioning she told in a voice as clear as a child's, yet with a woman's emotion struggling through it, the story of her disregarded warning. While she spoke pain and shame travelled through his every vein, for--though technically she had not brought herself into the perplexing purview of the law--she was laying bare the secret of her own heart, which now he would have covered at any cost.
"That is all, your Honor," said Felder, when Jessica had finished her story.
"Do you wish to cross-examine?" asked the judge perfunctorily.
The prosecutor looked at her an instant. He saw the faintness in her eyes, the twitching of the gloved hand on the rail. "By no means," he said courteously, and turned to his papers.