An attorney for Clara Harris, the woman accused of killing her cheating husband by running him over with her car, collapsed Wednesday in a courtroom hallway.

Witnesses said that lead defense attorney George Parnham grew woozy and fainted during a lunch break in the murder trial.

He appeared alert as deputies and associates, then paramedics, tended to him while he lay on the floor with a towel on his forehead.

Parnham has been sick with the flu during the entire trial, News2Houston reported.

"George has the flu. Any trial lawyer has tremendous stress, especially a case like this, and the combination made him lightheaded and he had a fainting spell. Or he had a weak moment and was lightheaded and that's exactly what happened," said Wendell Odom, Parnham's law partner. "He's OK. He's doing fine. We're not going to lose this jury. We're going to resume the trial."

Parnham never lost consciousness and was alert the entire time, officials said.

He was taken to St. Luke's Hospital for observation.

The trial will resume on Friday.

Shortly before the lunch break, Harris took the stand in her own defense in the 177th District Court in downtown Houston.

Harris, 45, described to jurors how her marriage and friendship with orthodontist David Harris crumbled under his infidelity.

"We were best friends. We were very much in love," Clara Harris said of her 10-year marriage to David Harris, 44, which ended July 24 in the parking lot of a suburban Houston hotel parking lot when she ran over him with her Mercedes-Benz after catching him with his acknowledged lover.

"We are mature people. We had both gone through divorce. We felt like there was no better couple than us. We were a perfect team."

Harris spent about 90 minutes on the stand Wednesday morning before a lunch break and Parnham had not yet questioned her about the evening of David Harris' death.

Clara Harris claims the death was accidental. Prosecutor Mia Magness contends it was intentional, making it murder.

In her testimony, Harris explained how the couple met as associates at a dental office, their eventual marriage, birth of twin sons and the establishment of their separate practices -- hers in Lake Jackson, a Brazoria County city about an hour south of Houston, and his in far southeast Houston.

Their life together was progressing well heading into 2002, Clara Harris said, when David Harris began to change that spring and summer.

"He was a little bit more retracted. He was a little bit more stressed. He was a little bit more intolerant of the boys," she said, although she attributed some of the stress to the construction of his new orthodontic practice.

He was spending less time with his family and more time to himself, she said.

An employee told Clara Harris July 16 her husband had been seeing receptionist Gail Bridges. The next morning, Harris said her husband told her he had been modestly intimate with Bridges, but stepdaughter Lindsey Harris told her the adulterous relationship was much deeper.

"I went to slap him in the face," Clara Harris said, but her husband -- a martial arts expert -- fended her off and threw her to the bathroom floor.

She said he agreed to marital counseling and the firing of Bridges, then backed off. She said she fired Bridges, at her husband's office, while he watched through a glass door.

"I asked her, 'What kind of relationship do you have with my husband?'" Clara Harris said. "She said, 'I don't understand.'" Each time Clara Harris related something said by Bridges, she used a mocking, high-pitched voice to imitate her husband's soft-spoken lover.

The couple spent the next two days discussing their relationship and how to fix it. At an airport bar July 18, Harris said she took notes on a napkin, making a side-by-side comparison of her and her rival. Where David Harris said his wife was pretty, smart and educated, he said his lover was "reasonably" pretty, "reasonably" smart and "reasonably" educated.

She testified her husband listed Bridges' advantages as communication and willingness to allow him to do "anything he wanted to do."

Some legal experts said that they agreed with the defense's move to put Harris on the stand.