Rush had been administering awkward little pats to the soft masses of her hair. Suddenly he realised that his faith in her complete innocence was by no means as stable as it had been; she had confessed to him that she had been in the grove that night stalking the intruder. How absurd to believe that she had gone out unarmed. He had read the circumstantial details of the reporter's interviews with Frieda and young Kraus. While the writers were careful not to make the downright assertion that Mrs. Balfame had fired the fatal shot, the public saw her in the act of levelling one of the pistols--so mighty is the power of the trained and ruthless pen. As he stood looking down upon his unexpected surrender to emotional excitement, he asked himself deliberately: What more natural, if she had a pistol in her hand and that low-lived creature presented himself abruptly and alone, than that it should go off of its own accord, so to speak, whether hers had been the bullet to penetrate that loathsome target or not? If so, what had she done with the pistol? He sat down and laid his hand firmly on her arm. "There is something I must tell you. It is something Frieda forgot to tell the reporter, but she gave it to the Grand Jury. With the help of a couple of extra gin fizzes, I extracted it from Gore. It is this: she told the Grand Jury that several times when she did her weekly cleaning upstairs she saw a pistol in the drawer of a table beside your bed. Will--won't you tell me?" He felt the arm in his clasp grow rigid, but Mrs. Balfame answered without a trace of her recent agitation: "I told you before that I never had a pistol. It would be like her to be spying about among my things, but I wonder she would admit it." "She is delighted with her new importance, and, I fancy, has been bribed to tell all she knows." "In that case she wouldn't mind telling more. And no doubt she will think of other sensational items before the trial. She will have awakened in the night after the crime and heard me drop the pistol between the walls, or she will have seen me loading it on the afternoon of the shooting." "Yes, there is no knowing when those low-grade imaginations, once started, will stop. Memory ceases to function in brains of that sort, and its place is taken by a confused jumble of induced or auto suggestions, which are carefully straightened out by the practised lawyer in rehearsals. But I almost wish that you had taken a pistol out that night and would tell me where to find it. I'd lose it somewhere out in the marsh." "I had no pistol." Not yet could she take him into her confidence to that extent, although she knew that he was about to stake his professional reputation on her acquittal.