rst perceptible loss
of courage before the yawning gulf opening before her.

I felt myself seized by a very uncomfortable dread lest her
concealments and unfinished sentences hid a guiltier knowledge of
this crime than I was yet ready to admit.

The coroner, who is an older man than myself, betrayed a certain
satisfaction but no dread. Never did the unction which underlies
his sharpest speeches show more plainly than when he quietly
remarked:

"And so under a similar impulse you, as well as Mr. Jeffrey, chose
this uncanny place to ramble in. To all appearance that old hearth
acted much more like a lodestone upon members of your family than
you were willing at one time to acknowledge."

This reference to words she had herself been heard to use seemed to
overwhelm her. 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. Probably she realized at this moment,
if not before, that the coroner and jury had ample excuse for
mistrusting one who had been so unmistakably caught in a
prevarication; possibly her regret carried her far enough to wish
she had not disdained all legal advice from those who had so
earnestly offered