On the fourth day the district attorney opened the case with an address to the jury which was a masterpiece of temperate statement and damning suggestion. He dwelt long upon the remarkable points of the case: the youth and beauty and intelligence and social position of the defendant, the distinguished family which had been plunged into sorrow and disgrace by her crime, the extraordinary interest the crime had excited throughout the civilised world. He then gave a running account, clear and straightforward and decisive, of what the prosecution would prove, and concluded with a cold, terse, but reiterated warning that the prisoner at the bar was entitled to no sympathy because of her sex and position; that he and the jury were there for one purpose only: to consider the facts of the case and to do their plain duty, utterly regardless of consequences to the individual. Every word was chosen and weighed, and told like the ring of a steel hammer on a steel plate.

Dr. Lewis was then called to prove the fact of Beverly Peele’s death, and his vigorous story weighed heavily in the scales against the defence. The moment the district attorney sat down Bourke was on his feet. For a moment he stood lifting and shaking the loose cloth of the table beside him; then asked one or two random questions which put the witness for the prosecution quite at his ease. In the course of a moment the witness began to writhe, and at the end of five minutes manifested his consciousness of the fact that he was a small country practitioner, to be regarded by any intelligent jury with contempt. Nevertheless, it was impossible to shake his testimony.

He was followed by the New York physician, a man of eminence, who had assisted at the death-bed, then by the coroner. The fact of young Peele’s death being firmly established in the jury box, a chemist was put upon the stand to testify that he had found morphine in the stomach of the deceased. He was worried and badgered and ridiculed and derided by Bourke, who temporarily infected everybody in the court room with his scorn of the exercise of chemistry as applied to morphine in the stomach of a dead man, but held his ground, having been maltreated in a like manner many times before. Following, came a civil engineer, who described the grounds and general position of Peele Manor to the jury; and the testimony for the day was over.

The next morning the prosecution passed on to the motive. Honora was the first witness called. She wore a black frock and hat, and looked dignified and sad. In her clear childlike voice she described to the jury her moment of confusion and horror when awakened from a profound sleep by the prisoner; told the mournful story of the unavailing attempts at resuscitation; and hesitatingly admitted, in full detail, the unmistakable indifference of the wife. To the latter testimony Mr. Bourke “objected,” as he had done to similar testimony by the doctors, but the objection was over-ruled by the judge. She also admitted having seen from her window the defendant returning from town after her early visit on the morning of the “Eye” story, inappropriately attired in grey and pink, and having discovered the newspapers in confusion on the library floor before any other member of the household except the prisoner had arisen. She related Patience’s previous complaint that her husband always waited until she was in her first heavy sleep before demanding the morphine, and her fear lest she should some night give him an overdose. The jury must have been small headed indeed, to fail to understand the district attorney’s insinuations regarding the prisoner’s deep-laid scheme to avert suspicion.

As Honora gave her testimony Patience saw Mr. Bourke’s eyes sparkle. She knew that some pregnant idea had flashed into that lightning-like brain. As the district attorney took his seat he rose slowly and smiled sociably at Honora. She bent her head slightly; she had always liked him.

“Miss Mairs,” he said haltingly, his eyes wandering to the judge, as if in search of inspiration, his hand flirting the loose cloth of the table, “you are sure that Mrs. Peele wore a gray gown to New York that morning?”

“Yes, sir.”

“And the condition of the newspapers seemed to you to indicate great agitation of mind?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Yes, yes. And she returned in an hour or two, you say?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Miss Mairs!” he thundered, turning suddenly upon her and pointing a rigid finger straight at her startled face, “are you sure that you were asleep when Mrs. Peele awakened you on the night of Beverly Peele’s death?”

Patience drew her breath sharply. She closed her eyes. Honora had not been asleep that night! The certainty came to her as suddenly and as positively as it had come to Bourke.

For the fraction of a moment Honora hesitated. Every man and woman in the court room was breathless. Several had started to their feet.

“Quite sure,” she replied finally, and that silver shallow voice did not falter.

“You are sure that you heard no one go to the lavatory that night, before Mrs. Peele spoke to you?” He hurled the words at her as the Great Judge might hurl the final sentence on Judgment Day.

“Sure.”

“Was your door open that night?”

“I don’t remember.”

Patience leaned over and whispered to Lansing, who sprang forward and whispered to Bourke.

“The night was hot,” continued Bourke. “Were you not in the habit of leaving your door open on hot nights?”

“Sometimes.”

“Was it not always your custom?”

“Not always. When I thought of it I opened the door, but I frequently forgot it.”

“Yes! Yes! You are quite sure you cannot remember whether or not it was open on that night?”

“I cannot remember.”

“Do you remember any other nights on which Mrs. Peele went to the lavatory to drop the morphine?”

“Yes, sir; a great many.”

“But of this all important night you remember nothing?”

“No, sir.”

“Yes! Mrs. Peele never was called upon to drop the morphine until after twelve o’clock. Were you in the habit of lying awake until late?”

“Yes.”

“But on this night you went to sleep early?”

“Yes.”

“You heard or saw—you are on your oath, remember—nothing whatever until Mrs. Peele called you?”

“Nothing.”

“You can go.—She is lying,” he whispered to Patience. “Damn her, I’ll make her speak yet if I have to throttle it out of her.”

Mr. Peele was the witness next called. He was treated with extreme diffidence by the district attorney, and even the judge gave him a fraternal smile. He told the story of the momentous night with parental indignation finally controlled, then, in spite of repeated “objections” and constant nagging, the significant tale of wifely indifference and desertion, and read to the jury “that cruel letter written to a dying man” the day before the defendant returned to nurse her husband. He repeated with the dramatic effect of the legal actor those dark insinuations of the prisoner: “You had better let me go! I feel that I shall kill him if I stay!” And later in the town house when she had struck her husband in the face: “You had better keep him out of my way. Do you know that once I tried to kill my own mother?”

He told of her eager interest in untraceable poisons one night when the subject of murder had come up at the dinner-table, her cold-blooded analysis of human motives.

Then he passed on to the painfully significant history of the day before the death: her demand for a divorce; her fury at her husband’s refusal; her acknowledgment that she had quarrelled violently with the deceased a short time before calling the family to his death-bed.

As he spoke Patience’s blood congealed. The woman he depicted was enough to inspire any jury with horror. It was herself and not herself, a Galatea manufactured by a clever lawyer.

But it was Mr. Bourke’s privilege to give the Galatea a soul. Despite the older man’s greater legal experience, his superior wariness and subtlety, he was forced to admit that his son was a fool; that his son’s wife was a woman of brilliant intellect driven to desperation at being tied down to a fool; that so long as she had lived with him she had done her duty; that when she had returned as his nurse she had fulfilled her part of the contract to the letter; that never had she given her husband cause for real jealousy; that the witness himself had made a companion of her, and that he had been bitterly disappointed in his son.

The terrible facts could not be stricken out, but Mr. Peele, nevertheless, was made to pass the most uncomfortable hours of his life. “And in spite of these threats,” exclaimed Bourke, with the accentuation of one addressing an idiot at large, “in spite of the precision with which you remembered them, you permitted your family to implore her to return and become your son’s nurse; you permitted her to sleep in a room communicating with his, where, in a fit of passion—if she is the woman you profess to believe her to be—she could have murdered him in the dead of night with a carving knife or a hatchet, before any one—even the lightly sleeping Miss Mairs—could have flown to the rescue; you permitted her—” he turned suddenly and faced the jury, then wheeled about and regarded Mr. Peele with scornful inquiry—“you permitted her to drop morphine for your son, and to have unrestrained access to the drug, knowing that he in his agony would swallow whatever she gave him without question. Will you kindly explain to the jury whether this mode of proceeding was ingenuousness on your part, or criminal connivance?”

Mr. Peele’s under lip pressed the upper almost to the septum of his nose. His eyes half closed and glittered unpleasantly; but he controlled himself and answered,—

“I paid no attention to her threats at the time.”

“Ah! You did not believe in them? You admit that?”

“I classed them with the usual hysterical ravings of women. That was my error.”

“State, if you please, your specific reasons for your change of mind. You will hardly, as a lawyer, claim to have been converted to the defendant’s capacity for crime by the mere fact that your son died of an overdose of morphine?”

And throughout the long day Mr. Bourke hectored him, fighting him, point by point, smashing to bits his testimony relative to the events of the day preceding the death, evidence to which he was not an eye-witness, which he had received at second hand from his wife and son. The “cruel letter written to a dying man” was disposed of in a similar manner.

“You believed your son to be in a precarious condition when you counselled them to send for your son’s wife?”

“I did.”

“But you believed with the doctors that if she returned, thereby bringing him peace of mind as well as tender care, he had excellent chances for life?”

“I did.”

“And Mrs. Burr was instructed to present that phase of the question to the defendant, with all the force of which she was capable?”

“Yes.”

“And the defendant so understood it?”

“I suppose she did.”

“And yet you assert that this purely business-like letter, written by a self-respecting woman, was addressed to a dying man, while at the same time you assert that this man could be cured by the gratification of a whim, and that you had taken particular pains to make the defendant aware of the fact!”

When Mr. Peele finally left the stand, he looked battered and limp.