. Mrs. Hunt's trailing draperies had somehow wound themselves
tightly about her legs below the knee, and I judge her feet were further
impeded by a sort of coverlet which I found touselled up on the rug
beneath them."

"Grant all that!" growled Maltby. "It points to just the opposite of
what we'd all like to think is true. If Mrs. Hunt had risen slowly to
greet a caller in the usual way--well, she wouldn't have gotten herself
tangled up. She was the last woman in the world to do anything
awkwardly. But if she leaped to her feet in terror--what? To defend
herself--or try to escape? Don't you see?"

"Of course we see!" cried Lucette. "It proves everything!"

"Hardly," I replied. "Try to imagine the scene, Maltby, as you seem to
believe it occurred. I won't speak of the major impossibility--that
Susan, a girl you've known and have asked to be your wife, could under
any circumstances be the author of such a crime! We'll pass that. Simply
try to picture the crime itself. Susan, showing no traces of unnatural
excitement, is conducted to my wife's boudoir. She enters, shuts the
door, turns, then rushes at her with so hideous an effect of insane fury
that Gertrude springs up, terrified. Susan--more slightly built than
Gertrude, remember!--grapples with her, tears a paper knife from her
hand, and plunges it deep into her eye, penetrating the brain. Suppose,
if you will, that madness lent her this force. But, obviously, for the
point of the knife to enter the eye in that way, Gertrude must have been
fronting Susan, her chin well raised. Obviously, the force of such a
blow would have thrown her head, her whole body, backward, not forward;
and if her feet were bound, as Doctor Askew says they were, she must
have fallen backward or to one side, certainly not forward at full
length, on her face."

"You've said somethin' this time, Mr. Hunt!" exclaimed Conlon. "There's
a lot to that!"

Maltby was visibly impressed; but not Lucette. "As if," she said, "Susan
wouldn't have arranged the body--afterward--in any way she thought to
her advantage!"

"There wasn't time!" Doctor Askew objected impatiently. "And," he went
on, "it happens that all this is futile! I have proof here,
corroborating Mr. Hunt's remarkably acute theories in the most positive
way."

But before reading what Susan's hand had written, he turned to Sergeant
Conlon, requesting his close attention, and then gave him briefly a
popular lecture on the nature of automat