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By Root 24596 0

upon his arm never for an instant left his consciousness, filling him with an exaltation that enraged and bewildered him. He was still cursing himself furiously behind the mask of conventional solicitude that he turned to the lady when he had attended her to the house and seen her sink upon a couch in the morning-room. Raising her veil, she thanked him gravely and frankly, with a look of sincere gratitude in her eyes. She was much better now, she said, and a cup of tea would work a miracle upon her. She hoped she had not taken him away from anything important. She was ashamed of herself; she thought she could go through with it, but she had not expected those last questions. 'I am glad you did not hear me,' she said when he explained. 'But of course you will read it all in the reports. It shook me so to have to speak of that,' she added simply; 'and to keep from making an exhibition of myself took it out of me. And all those staring men by the door! Thank you again for helping me when I asked you .... I thought I might,' she ended queerly, with a little tired smile; and Trent took himself away, his hand still quivering from the cool touch of her fingers.

The testimony of the servants and of the finder of the body brought nothing new to the reporters' net. That of the police was as colourless and cryptic as is usual at the inquest stage of affairs of the kind. Greatly to the satisfaction of Mr Bunner, his evidence afforded the sensation of the day, and threw far into the background the interesting revelation of domestic difficulty made by the dead man's wife. He told the court in substance what he had already told Trent. The flying pencils did not miss a word of the young American's story, and it appeared with scarcely the omission of a sentence in every journal of importance in Great Britain and the United States.

Public opinion next day took no note of the faint suggestion of the possibility of suicide which the coroner, in his final address to the jury, had thought it right to make in connection with the lady's evidence. The weight of evidence, as the official had indeed pointed out, was against such a theory. He had referred with emphasis to the fact that no weapon had been found near the body.

'This question, of course, is all-important, gentlemen,' he had said to the jury. 'It is, in fact, the main issue before you. You have seen the body for yourselves. You have just heard the medical evidence; but I think it would be well for me to read you my notes of it in so far as they bear on this point, in order to refresh your memories. Dr Stock told you--I am going to omit all technical medical language and repeat to you merely the plain English of his testimony--that in his opinion death had taken place six or eight hours previous to the finding of the body. He said that the cause of death was a bullet wound, the bullet having entered the left eye, which was destroyed, and made its way to the base of the brain, which was quite shattered. The external appearance of the wound, he said, did not support the hypothesis of its being self-inflicted, inasmuch as there were no signs of the firearm having been pressed against the eye, or even put very close to it; at the same time it was not physically impossible that the weapon should have been discharged by the deceased with his own hand, at some small distance from the eye. Dr Stock also told us that it was impossible to say with certainty, from the state of the body, whether any struggle had taken place at the time of death; that when seen by him, at which time he understood that it had not been moved since it was found, the body was lying in a collapsed position such as might very well result from the shot alone; but that the scratches and bruises upon the wrists and the lower part of the arms had been very recently inflicted, and were, in his opinion, marks of violence.

'In connection with this same point, the remarkable evidence given by Mr Bunner cannot be regarded, I think, as without significance. It may have come as a surprise to some of you to hear that risks of the