showed me this Confederate revolver when
he came home, but it was dirty and dusty, and I didn't touch it. And I
didn't look closely at the one he had in his hand when he was ... on the
floor. It was about the same size and design; that's all I could swear
to." She continued: "We had something of an argument about what to do.
Walters, the butler, offered to call the police. He's English, and his
mind seems to run naturally to due process of law. Fred and Anton both
howled that proposal down; they wanted no part of the police. At the
same time, Geraldine was going into hysterics, and I was trying to get
her quieted down. I took her to her room and gave her a couple of
sleeping-pills, and then went back to the gunroom. While I was gone, it
seems that Anton had called our family doctor, Dr. Yardman, and then Fred
called Humphrey Goode, our lawyer. Goode lives next door to us, about two
hundred yards away, so he arrived almost at once. When the doctor came,
he called the coroner, and when he arrived, about an hour later, they all
went into a huddle and decided that it was an obvious accident and that
no inquest would be necessary. Then somebody, I'm not sure who, called an
undertaker. It was past eleven when he arrived, and for once, Nelda got
home early. She was just coming in while they were carrying Lane out in a
basket. You can imagine how horrible that was for her; it was days before
she was over the shock. So she'll be just as glad as anybody to see the
last of the pistol-collection."

Through the recital, Rand had sat silently, toying with the ivory-handled
Italian Fascist dagger-of-honor that was doing duty as a letter-opener on
his desk. Gladys Fleming wasn't, he was sure, indulging in any
masochistic self-harrowing; neither, he thought, was she talking to
relieve her mind. Once or twice there had been a small catch in her
voice, but otherwise the narration had been a piece of straight
reporting, neither callous nor emotional. Good reporting, too; carefully
detailed. There had been one or two inclusions of inferential matter in
the guise of description, but that was to be looked for and discounted.
And she had remembered, at the end, to include her ostensible reason for
telling the story.

"Yes, it must have been dreadful," he sympathized. "Odd, though, that an
old hand with guns like Mr. Fleming would have an accident like that. I
met him, once or twice, and was at your home to see his collection, a
couple of yea