“No,” she said sullenly.

The district attorney glanced around the room triumphantly.

“Not since Stoddard’s arrest, eh? I see. That’s a nice point.”

They were not entirely satisfied when they let her go. They tried to have her admit that she had been near the playhouse the night of Don’s murder, but she said flatly she was not.

“If you want to know, I met Mrs. Stoddard that night,” she told them, glaring at Hopper. “You and the flower I dropped out of my hair! Ask Margery Stoddard where I was.”

“Another little financial transaction?” Hopper drawled.

“That’s strictly my affair,” she flared.

She admitted that she had known Don in Paris, and that he had told her who Margery was. But she denied absolutely that there had been any collusion between them. “I didn’t even know he was coming back to America,” she said.

She flounced out when it was over, after being warned not to leave the vicinity. She must have felt relieved, rather than anything else. She had told them enough, but not too much. If she gave Julian a thought, it was probably that few men of his sort go to the chair, and let it go at that.

But she was wrong. The district attorney had set out to send him to the chair, and he meant to do it. Already he was preparing his opening speech for the trial; walking up and down the floor of his office and dictating to a patient stenographer:

“The State will show, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, that this defendant had both motive and opportunity for the crime by which an unfortunate man lost his life. We intend to go into that motive, and to show it was for a cheap and tawdry reason that the crime was committed.

“Here is a man proud of his position in the world. When he found it threatened, it is the contention of the State—and we expect to prove it—that he took desperate means to preserve it and to hide his secret.

“We shall prove not only his hatred of the dead man, but we shall show that, on the night in question, he played bridge—yes, ladies and gentlemen, he played bridge!—until midnight or thereabouts. And that then, dressed in dinner clothes, he started home from this gay party, on foot. Other guests drove cars, but he walked home.

“His house is half a mile away or less. A ten-minute walk at the most. But he did not arrive at that house until after one o’clock in the morning. When he did it was from the ravine where the murder car had been left. He has no alibi for that hour. He says he was walking about. I have his statement here. ‘I had some things to think over. I walked about for a while.’ Is that the testimony of an innocent man?

“There will be a question of the time element in this case placed before you. It may be argued that the time was not sufficient for all that was done. But we shall prove to you that this defendant had more than one hour. Owing to the lapse of time it was not possible to state exactly the hour of this dastardly murder. But we shall show that it was possible for this defendant to have left the bridge table on some excuse or other, go to the scene of the crime, commit it and return. In fact, we shall show that he did leave the bridge table, to be absent for some minutes. And this crime, ladies and gentlemen, did not require more than a moment. A man feeble from illness, knocked unconscious and then thrown into a pool to drown—how long did that require?