“When your wife left you at the bridge, did she say where she was going?”

“No.”

“You claim that this woman at Horner was your wife?”

“I think it likely.”

“Was there an onyx clock in the second-story room when you moved into it?”

“I do not recall the clock.”

“Your wife did not take an onyx clock away with her?”

Mr. Ladley smiled.  “No.”

The defense called Mr. Howell next.  He looked rested, and the happier for having seen Lida, but he was still pale and showed the strain of some hidden anxiety.  What that anxiety was, the next two days were to tell us all.

“Mr. Howell,” Mr. Llewellyn asked, “you know the prisoner?”

“Slightly.”

“State when you met him.”

“On Sunday morning, March the fourth.  I went to see him.”

“Will you tell us the nature of that visit?”

“My paper had heard he was writing a play for himself.  I was to get an interview, with photographs, if possible.”

“You saw his wife at that time?”

“Yes.”

“When did you see her again?”

“The following morning, at six o’clock, or a little later.  I walked across the Sixth Street bridge with her, and put her on a train for Horner, Pennsylvania.”

“You are positive it was Jennie Brice?”

“Yes.  I watched her get out of the boat, while her husband steadied it.”

“If you knew this, why did you not come forward sooner?”

“I have been out of the city.”

“But you knew the prisoner had been arrested, and that this testimony of yours would be invaluable to him.”

“Yes.  But I thought it necessary to produce Jennie Brice herself.  My unsupported word—­”

“You have been searching for Jennie Brice?”

“Yes.  Since March the eighth.”

“How was she dressed when you saw her last?”

“She wore a red and black hat and a black coat.  She carried a small brown valise.”

“Thank you.”

The cross-examination did not shake his testimony.  But it brought out some curious things.  Mr. Howell refused to say how he happened to be at the end of the Sixth Street bridge at that hour, or why he had thought it necessary, on meeting a woman he claimed to have known only twenty-four hours, to go with her to the railway station and put her on a train.

The jury was visibly impressed and much shaken.  For Mr. Howell carried conviction in every word he said; he looked the district attorney in the eye, and once when our glances crossed he even smiled at me faintly.  But I saw why he had tried to find Jennie Brice, and had dreaded testifying.  Not a woman in that court room, and hardly a man, but believed when he left the stand, that he was, or had been, Jennie Brice’s lover, and as such was assisting her to leave her husband.

“Then you believe,” the district attorney said at the end,—­“you believe, Mr. Howell, that Jennie Brice is living?”