The coroner, surveying her sadly, went quickly on as if anxious to
terminate this painful examination.

"You have not told us what you did when you heard that pistol-shot."

"I ran away as soon as I could move; I ran madly from the house."

"Where?"

"Home."

"But it was half-past ten when you got home."

"Was it?"

"It was half-past ten when the man came to tell you of your
sister's death."

"It may have been."

"Your sister is supposed to have died in a few minutes. Where were
you in the interim?"

"God knows. I do not."

A wild look was creeping into her face, and her figure was swaying.
But she soon steadied it. I have never seen a more admirable
presence maintained in the face of a dreadful humiliation.

"Perhaps I can help you," rejoined the coroner, not unkindly. "Were
you not in the Congressional Library looking up at the lunettes and
gorgeously painted walls?"

"I?" Her eyes opened wide in wondering doubt. "If I was, I did
not know it. I have no remembrance of it."

She seemed to lose sight of her present position, the cloud under
which she rested, and even the construction which might be put upon
such a forgetfulness at a time confessedly prior to her knowledge
of the purpose and effect of the shot from which she had so
incontinently fled.

"Your condition of mind and that of Mr. Jeffrey seem to have been
strangely alike," remarked the coroner.

"No, no!" she protested.

"Arguing a like source."

"No, no," she cried again, this time with positive agony. Then with
an effort which awakened respect for her powers of mind, if for
nothing else, she desperately added: "I can not say what was in his
heart that night, but I know what was in mine--dread of that old
house, to which I had been drawn in spite of myself, possibly by the
force of the tragedy going on inside it, culminating in a delirium
of terror, which sent me flying in an opposite direction from my home
and into places I had been accustomed to visit when my heart was
light and untroubled."

The coroner glanced at the jury, who unconsciously shook their heads.
He shook his, too, as he returned to the charge.

"Another question, Miss Tuttle. When you heard a pistol-shot
sounding from the depths of that dark library, what did you think it
meant?"

She put her hands over her ears--it seemed as if she could not
prevent this instinctive expression of recoil at the mention of the
death-dealing weapon--and in very low to