Page:Bailey - Call Mr Fortune (Dutton, 1921).djvu/76

Rh a point of honour to use terms so technical that all his evidence had to be translated to the jury, and the coroner and he argued over the translation.

"What a life, ain't it?" Mr. Gordon murmured in Reggie's ear.

At last came what the evening papers called "Dramatic Evidence": the housemaid who had found the body and had hysterics over again as she described it; Mrs. Betts, who had found May Weston sleeping beside it, waked her, and heard her say, "I did it—oh, I did it!"

"Sensation in Court" was the cross-head for that. The coroner looked over his glasses at the jury, and the jury muttered together, and May Weston came into the box. With the manner of a chaplain at an execution the coroner warned her that she need not give answers that would incriminate her. "I want to tell you everything," she said. She was very pale in her black, and listless of manner, but quite calm.

What she told was the queer story she had told Reggie, but she was not allowed to tell it her own way. The coroner badgered her with continual questions designed to make the queerness of it seem queerer. He made her nervous, confused her, frightened her. "You bother me so that I don't know if I'm telling the truth or not," she quavered.

Then, in the language of the newspapers, "another sensation." Mr. Ford, large and red, started up and