ow,
she said, and a cup of tea would work a miracle upon her. She hoped
she had not taken him away from anything important. She was ashamed
of herself; she thought she could go through with it, but she had not
expected those last questions. 'I am glad you did not hear me,' she said
when he explained. 'But of course you will read it all in the reports.
It shook me so to have to speak of that,' she added simply; 'and to keep
from making an exhibition of myself took it out of me. And all those
staring men by the door! Thank you again for helping me when I asked
you.... I thought I might,' she ended queerly, with a little tired
smile; and Trent took himself away, his hand still quivering from the
cool touch of her fingers.

The testimony of the servants and of the finder of the body brought
nothing new to the reporters' net. That of the police was as colourless
and cryptic as is usual at the inquest stage of affairs of the kind.
Greatly to the satisfaction of Mr Bunner, his evidence afforded the
sensation of the day, and threw far into the background the interesting
revelation of domestic difficulty made by the dead man's wife. He
told the court in substance what he had already told Trent. The flying
pencils did not miss a word of the young American's story, and it
appeared with scarcely the omission of a sentence in every journal of
importance in Great Britain and the United States.

Public opinion next day took no note of the faint suggestion of the
possibility of suicide which the coroner, in his final address to
the jury, had thought it right to make in connection with the lady's
evidence. The weight of evidence, as the official had indeed pointed
out, was against such a theory. He had referred with emphasis to the
fact that no weapon had been found near the body.

'This question, of course, is all-important, gentlemen,' he had said to
the jury. 'It is, in fact, the main issue before you. You have seen the
body for yourselves. You have just heard the medical evidence; but I
think it would be well for me to read you my notes of it in so far as
they bear on this point, in order to refresh your memories. Dr Stock
told you--I am going to omit all technical medical language and repeat
to you merely the plain English of his testimony--that in his opinion
death had taken place six or eight hours previous to the finding of the
body. He said that the cause of death was a bullet wound, the bullet
having entered the left eye, w