“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 was at the end of the corridor on the second floor—tendin’ to a little work. Then I saw Miss Edith come stealin’ out of her room.”