"Nevertheless, before you hear my client's story from her own lips, I must ask you to weigh very carefully certain evidence which the Crown has thought fit to call against her. With the testimony of John Hodges and of James Travers, honest testimony, let us hope, I shall deal at a later stage of these proceedings. But the evidence of Maggie Peterson calls for different treatment. Because Maggie Peterson has lied--and lied deliberately! "Lied--and lied deliberately." Now, as passion mounted and mounted, kindling the quiet voice to rage, Brunton's head twitched from his brief, and his eyes, the cold gray eyes under the gray wig, glanced fearfully about the packed court-room. "Because, on the night of July 4, the night when Maggie Peterson swears that she saw my client making her way to Robert Fielding's room, Maggie Peterson was not at 25 Laburnum Grove at all." Ronnie paused, letting his every word sink home. Rain, pattering suddenly on the glass dome above, seemed to emphasize the silence below. Then passionately the speech ended. "My lord, members of the jury, I ask for no mercy. I ask only for justice. I ask you to remember, even while you are listening to my client's testimony, that the main evidence against her, the evidence of this woman Peterson is, from beginning to end, one tissue of deliberate lies, of the most wilful and corrupt perjury, as I shall prove to you out of the mouth of a competent witness, the landlord of the Red Lion Tavern, who will testify to you beyond the shadow of a doubt that from eight o'clock till after ten on the night of July 4, Maggie Peterson never left his establishment; who will testify, moreover, that Maggie Peterson's companion on the night in question was none other than my unfortunate client's husband, William Towers himself." And on that, satisfied with the utter hush which followed, Ronald Cavendish put his client in the box. 3 There are seconds in every man's life when the conviction of his own wrong-doing shatters the edifice of conceit and flings illusion headlong. Such a second came to Hector Brunton, K.C., as he watched Lucy Towers step down from the side of the dock and make her way past the packed benches to the witness-box. With her--he could feel--went a wave, a great wave of human sympathy, the wave against which he, Hector Brunton, had been swimming for more than a year. Paralyzed he watched her--watched her take the oath, kiss the book. His mind was a torment, a torment of conscience. Conscience howled: "You knew! You knew all the time that your principal witness was lying. You knew! You knew all the time that this woman was no adulteress. She's innocent, innocent, Hector Brunton; as innocent in intention as that other woman you've been hounding." Cavendish's voice, the voice of his enemy, broke the spell.