about five minutes in the witness-box, but in those five minutes she
supplied the defence with one of its strongest arguments. It was at
least conceivable that a woman who had killed her husband might coolly
proceed to pack her trunk, and thereafter fetch the cab which was to
remove herself and her effects from the scene of the tragedy. But was it
credible that a woman of so much presence of mind, to whom every minute
might make the difference between life and death, would, having found
her cab, actually drive out of her way to inquire after a sick friend,
or even a dying lover, before going home to pick up her luggage and to
ascertain whether her crime was still undetected? Suppose it were a
lover, and inquire one must: would one not still leave those inquiries
to the last? And having made them, last or first; and knowing the grim
necessity of flight; would one woman go out of her way to tell another
that she "had to go abroad very suddenly, and was going for good?"

"Inconceivable!" cried the prisoner's counsel, dealing with the point;
and the word was much upon his lips during the course of a long and very
strenuous speech, in which the case for the Crown was flouted from
beginning to end, without, perhaps, enough of concentration on its more
obvious weaknesses, or of respect for its undoubted strength. For the
prisoner's proceedings on the night of the murder, however, supposing
she had committed it, and still more on the morning after, it would have
been difficult to find a better epithet; the only drawback was that this
one had seen service in the cause of almost every murderer who ever went
to the gallows--as counsel for the prosecution remarked in his reply,
with deadly deference to his learned friend.

"On the other hand," he went on, wagging his eyeglasses with leisurely
deliberation, and picking his words with a care that enhanced their
effect, after the unbridled rhetoric of the defence--"on the other hand,