ested Lady
Flintshire, "Maria Annunziata," who sat close by.

"My dear, how can you suggest such a thing," retorted the other, "they
are so common."

"Silence there!"

And once more the cackling geese were still.

CHAPTER XXV

THE FOG WAS DENSE, I COULDN'T RIGHTLY SEE

The curtain went up on the first act of the play. It was not perhaps
so interesting from the outset as the audience would have wished, and
the fashionable portion thereof showed its impatience by sundry
coughings and whisperings, which had to be peremptorily checked now
and again by a loud:

"Silence, there!" and a threat to clear the court.

The medical officer was giving his testimony at great length as to the
cause of death. Technical terms were used in plenty, and puzzled the
elegant ladies who had come here to be amused. The jury listened
attentively, and the coroner--himself a medical man--asked several
very pertinent questions:

"The thrust," he asked of Doctor Blair, who was medical officer of the
district, "through the neck was effected by means of a long narrow
instrument, with two sharp edges, a dagger in fact?"

"A dagger or a stiletto or a skewer," replied the doctor. "Any sharp,
two-edged instrument would cause a wound like the one in the neck of
the deceased."

"Was death instantaneous?"

"Almost so."

He explained at some length the intricacies of the human throat at
the points where the murderer's weapon had entered the neck of his
victim. Louisa listened attentively. Every moment she expected to see
the coroner's hand wandering to the piece of green baize in front of
him, and then drawing it away disclosing a snake-wood stick with
silver ferrule stained, and showing the rise of the dagger, sheathed
within the body of the stick. Every moment she expected to hear the
query:

"Is this the instrument which dealt the blow?"

But this apparently was not to be just yet. The opaque veil of green
baize was not to be lifted; that certain long Something was not to be
revealed, the Something that would condemn Luke irrevocably,
absolutely, to disgrace and to death.

Only one of the members of the jury--Louisa understood that he was the
foreman--asked a simple question:

"Would," he said, "the witness explain whether in his opinion the--the
unknown murderer--the--I mean----"

He floundered a little in the phrase, having realized that in his
official capacity he must keep an open mind--and in that open mind of
an Eng