Her calmness fled and she cast a fleeting look of
anguish at Mr. Jeffrey. But his face was turned from sight, and,
meeting with no help there, or anywhere, indeed, save in her own
powerful nature, she recovered as best she could the ground she had
lost and, with a trembling question of her own, attempted to put
the coroner in fault and reestablish herself.
"You say 'ramble through.' Do you for a moment think that I entered
that old house?"
"Miss Tuttle," was the grave, almost sad reply, "did you not know
that in some earth, dropped from a flower-pot overturned at the
time when a hundred guests flew in terror from this house, there is
to be seen the mark of a footstep, - a footstep which you are at
liberty to measure with your own?"
"Ah!" she murmured, her hands going up to her face.
But in another moment she had dropped them and looked directly at
the coroner.
"I walked there - I never said that I did not walk there - when I
went later to see my sister and in sight of a number of detectives
passed straight through the halls and into the library."
"And that this footstep," inexorably proceeded the coroner, "is not
in a line with the main thoroughfare extending from the front to the
back of the house, but turned inwards toward the wall as if she who
made it had stopped to lean her head against the partition?"
Miss Tuttle's head drooped.
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