get
down to cases. You understand that, I suppose."

"Perfectly." Pescini leaned back, folding his hands. "Perfectly," he
said again.

"I believe you recently filed and won a suit for divorce against your
wife, Marie Pescini. Isn't this true?"

The witness nodded. None of us heard him speak.

"May I ask what was your grounds, stated in your complaint?"

"I don't see that it makes any difference. The grounds were the only
ones by which divorce can be granted in the State of New York."

"Infidelity, I believe?"

"Yes. Infidelity."

"You named certain co-respondents?"

"Yes."

"I ask you this. Was there any man whom you regarded as one of those
that had helped to break up your home that, for any reason in the world,
you did not name in your complaint?"

"There was not. You are absolutely off on the wrong track."

The coroner dismissed him pre-emptorily, then turned to Edith Nealman.
He asked her the usual questions, with considerable care and in rather
surprising detail--how long she had worked as Nealman's secretary,
whether he had any enemies; he sounded her as to the missing man's
habits, his finances, his most intimate life.

"When did you last see Mr. Nealman?" he asked quickly.

"Just before yesterday's inquest--when he went to his room."

"He didn't call you for any work?"

"No."

"You didn't see him in the corridor--in his room--in the study adjoining
his room--or anywhere else?"

"No." Edith's face was stark white, and her voice was very low. Not one
of us could ever forget how she looked--that slim, girlish figure in the
big chair, the frightened eyes, the pale, sober face. The coroner
smiled, a little, grim smile that touched some unpleasant part of me,
then abruptly turned to Mrs. Gentry, the housekeeper.

"I'll have to ask you to give publicly, Mrs. Gentry, the testimony you
gave me before this inquest."

"I didn't tell you that to speak out in court," the woman replied,
angrily. "There wasn't nothin' to it, anyway. I'm sorry I told you----"

"That's for me to decide--whether there was anything to it. It won't
injure any one who is innocent, Mrs. Gentry. What happened, about
ten-thirty or eleven o'clock."

The woman answered as if under compulsion--in the helpless voice of one
who, in a long life's bitter struggle, has learned the existence of many
masters. Mrs. Gentry had learned to yield. To her this trivial court was
a resistless power, many of which existed in her world.

"I