she was able to preserve
her own courage and calmness through the sordid ordeal of the lengthy
inquest and the empty pomp of the funeral of the young wife. Her own
heart was bruised and numb within her with the horrors which had been
heaped upon her. She was like one who had seen a pit open suddenly at
her feet, revealing terrible human obscenities and abominations
wallowing nakedly in the depths. It was a poignant shock to her that
human nature was capable of such infamy. Her startled virgin eyes saw
for the first time in the monstrous passion of sex a force which was
stronger than her own most cherished beliefs. If a sweet and gentle girl
like Hazel Rath, who had been brought up under her own eye to walk
uprightly, could be swept away in the surge of tempestuous passion to
commit murder, where did Faith and Religion stand?

Almost as much as the effect of the murder did she fear the result of
this second revelation on her nephew. The knowledge that the person
accused of killing his wife was a girl who had lived in his own home for
years was bound to have an additionally injurious effect on his strange
and sensitive temperament. Nobody knew that temperament better than Miss
Heredith. It was not the Heredith temperament. It had been the heritage
of his mother, a strange, elfin, wayward creature, who had died bringing
Phil into the world. Like all sisters, Miss Heredith had wondered what
her brother had seen in his wife to marry her. Phil had all along been a
disappointment to his father. He had come into the world with a lame
foot and a frail frame, and the Herediths had always been noted for
masculine strength and grace. Instead of growing up with a scorn for
books and an absorbing love of sport, like a true Heredith, Phil had
early revealed symptoms of a bookish, studious disposition, reserved and
shy, with little liking for other boys or boyish games. His one hobby
was an interest in natural history. He devoted his pocket money to the
purchase of strange pets, which he kept in cages while they lived and
stuffed when they died.

Miss Heredith had disapproved of this hobby, but had suffered it in
silence, on the principle that a Heredith could do no wrong, until one
winter's morning she had been frightened into her first and only fit of
hysterics by discovering a large spotted snake coiled snugly on some
flannel garments she was making for the wife of the curate, in
anticipation of that unfortunate lady's fifth lying