he shot the words at me, "I thought you said he had it in his hand."

"Yes," I stammered, "but that was before."

Mr. Dingley was watching me steadily.

"Now, Miss Ellie, aren't you a little confused on that point?"

I was indeed; but it was his manner that was doing it. He seemed to
snatch the words out of my mouth, and turn them into another meaning.
"But it was there! you saw it yourselves!" I appealed to him.

Father and Mr. Dingley glanced at each other, and a strange thought
came to me with a rush of relief. "Wasn't he dead, had he gone away,
didn't you find anything?"

The answering look of their faces made my heart go down like lead. "We
found everything as you told us except the revolver. There was no
revolver there."

I sat clutching the arms of the chair, staring hard at Mr. Dingley, who
seemed suddenly to have become a stranger to me. "Then some one must
have picked it up."

"But, Miss Ellie, you say that the street was absolutely deserted when
this thing occurred; and when I reached the spot there was a woman
looking out of a window, and some laborers running up from Sutter
Street, but no one had yet reached the place. Now, how could--"

Father struck in, "No, Jim, you'll only frighten her!" In a lower
voice he said something that sounded like, "Not on the stand yet."
Then, leaning toward me, across the table, resting on his elbow until
his face was level with my own, "I know you must have been much
frightened at what you saw, child, and it's possible you may have been
a little hysterical, isn't it? It's possible you might have fancied a
revolver in his hand, isn't it, when there was none there?"

He said this very slowly and gently, as if he were trying to soothe me,
but looking straight into his eyes I saw a sharp anxious light there,
and the conviction came to me that he very much wanted me to have been
mistaken. Mr. Dingley, from the fireplace, was watching me hard, as if
he were trying, with that incredulous look of his, to force it on me
that I must be mistaken. And then the thought floated through my mind
that in some way it would be better for that handsome, terrible man if
I could say I hadn't seen a revolver. I tried to make myself believe
that they were right; I shut my eyes. The picture came to me as if it
were before me still, and nothing in it was more clear than that thing
of steel and pearl. "I wasn't hysterical," I said, "I saw it plainly."

"Could you take your o