establish the alibi he had failed to make out on the day we
talked with him. But no such word came. His memory still played
him false, and no alternative was left but to pursue the official
inquiry in the line suggested by the interview just recounted.

No proceeding in which I had ever been engaged interested me as did
this inquest. In the first place, the spectators were of a very
different character from the ordinary. As I wormed myself along to
the seat accorded to such witnesses as myself, I brushed by men of
the very highest station and a few of the lowest; and bent my head
more than once in response to the inquiring gaze of some fashionable
lady who never before, I warrant, had found herself in such a scene.
By the time I reached my place all the others were seated and the
coroner rapped for order.

I was first to take the stand. What I said has already been fully
amplified in the foregoing pages. Of course, my evidence was
confined to facts, but some of these facts were new to most of the
persons there. It was evident that a considerable effect was
produced by them, not only on the spectators, but upon the
witnesses themselves. For instance, it was the first time that the
marks on the mantel-shelf had been heard of outside the major's
office, or the story so told as to make it evident that Mrs. Jeffrey
could not have been alone in the house at the time of her death.

A photograph had been taken of those marks, and my identification
of this photograph closed my testimony.

As I returned to my seat I stole a look toward a certain corner
where, with face bent down upon his hand, Francis Jeffrey sat
between Uncle David and the heavily-veiled figure of Miss Tuttle.
Had there dawned upon him as my testimony was given any suspicion of
the trick by which he had been proved responsible for those marks?
It was impossible to tell. From the way Miss Tuttle's head was
turned toward him, one might judge him to be laboring under an
emotion of no ordinary character, though he sat like a statue and
hardly seemed to realize how many eyes were at that moment riveted
upon his face.

I was followed by other detectives who had been present at the time
and who corroborated my statement as to the appearance of this
unhappy woman and the way the pistol had been tied to her arm. Then
the doctor who had acted under the coroner was called. After a long
and no doubt learned description of the bullet wound which had ended