She commenced in a forced tone and with a sudden quick shudder that made her words come hesitatingly and with strange breaks: "I have been asked--two questions by Mr. Ferris--I prefer--to answer the first. He asked me--where I was at the hour Mrs. Clemmens was murdered." She paused so long one had time to count her breaths as they came in gasps to her white lips. "I have no further desire to hide from you the truth. I was with Mrs. Clemmens in her own house." At this acknowledgment so astonishing, and besides so totally different from the one he had been led to expect, Mr. Ferris started as if a thunder-bolt had fallen at his feet. "In Mrs. Clemmens' house!" he repeated, amid the excited hum of a hundred murmuring voices. "Did you say, in Mrs. Clemmens' house?" "Yes," she returned, with a wild, ironical smile that at once assured Mr. Ferris of his helplessness. "I am on oath _now_, and I assert that on the day and at the hour Mrs. Clemmens was murdered, I was in her house and in her dining-room. I had come there secretly," she proceeded, with a sudden feverish fluency that robbed Mr. Ferris of speech, and in fact held all her auditors spell-bound. "I had been spending an hour or so at Professor Darling's, whose house in West Side is, as many here know, at the very end of Summer Avenue, and close to the woods that run along back of Mrs. Clemmens' cottage. I had been sitting alone in the observatory, which is at the top of one of the towers, but being suddenly seized with a desire to see the widow and make that promised attempt at persuading her to reconsider her decision in regard to the money her--her--the prisoner wanted, I came down, and unknown to any one in the house, stole away to the woods and so to the widow's cottage. It was noon when I got there, or very near it, for her company, if she had had any, was gone, and she was engaged in setting the clock where----" Why did she pause? The District Attorney, utterly stupefied by his surprise, had made no sign; neither had Mr. Orcutt. Indeed, it looked as if the latter could not have moved, much less spoken, even if he had desired it. Thought, feeling, life itself, seemed to be at a standstill within him as he sat with a face like clay, waiting for words whose import he perhaps saw foreshadowed in her wild and terrible mien. But though his aspect was enough to stop her, it was not upon him she was gazing when the words tripped on her lips. It was upon the prisoner, on the man who up to this time had borne himself with such iron-like composure and reserve, but who now, with every sign of feeling and alarm, had started forward and stood surveying her, with his hand uplifted in the authoritative manner of a master.