lest spectacle of a woman
triumphing over the weakness of her body by the mere force of her
indomitable will, that he had ever beheld.

"Sit down," he gently urged, pushing toward her a chair. "You have had a
hard and dreary week of it; you are in need of rest."

She did not refuse to avail herself of the chair, though, as he could
not help but notice, she did not thereby relax one iota of the restraint
she put upon herself.

"I do not understand," she murmured; "what question?"

"Miss Dare, in all you have told the court, in all that you have told
me, about this fatal and unhappy affair, you have never informed us how
it was you first came to hear of it. You were----"

"I heard it on the street corner," she interrupted, with what seemed to
him an almost feverish haste.

"First?"

"Yes, first."

"Miss Dare, had you been in the street long? Were you in it at the time
the murder happened, do you think?"

"I in the street?"

"Yes," he repeated, conscious from the sudden strange alteration in her
look that he had touched upon a point which, to her, was vital with some
undefined interest, possibly that to which the surmises of Hickory had
supplied a clue. "Were you in the street, or anywhere out-of-doors at
the time the murder occurred? It strikes me that it would be well for me
to know."

"Sir," she cried, rising in her sudden indignation, "I thought the time
for questions had passed. What means this sudden inquiry into a matter
we have all considered exhausted, certainly as far as I am concerned."

"Shall I show you?" he cried, taking her by the hand and leading her
toward the mirror near by, under one of those impulses which sometimes
effect so much. "Look in there at your own face and you will see why I
press this question upon you."

Astonished, if not awed, she followed with her eyes the direction of his
pointing finger, and anxiously surveyed her own image in the glass.
Then, with a quick movement, her hands went up before her face--which
till that moment had kept its counsel so well--and, tottering back
against a table, she stood for a moment communing with herself, and
possibly summoning up her courage for the conflict she evidently saw
before her.

"What is it you wish to know?" she faintly inquired, after a long period
of suspense and doubt.

"Where were you when the clock struck twelve on the day Mrs. Clemmens
was murdered?"

Instantly dropping her hands, she turned toward him with a sudden