"Alive?" she asked, her eyes stealing towards the door of the little den.
"Yes, miss; you surely have not seen him dead."
"I was with him at supper," she returned. "We were all there"; and for the first time she let her gaze fall on each one of her cousins in succession. "My uncle seemed as well then as at any time since his illness. He ate a good meal and drank——"
"And drank," repeated the coroner with a stern look behind him at the young men who had all moved at this.
"His usual glass of wine at dessert. He drank it alone!" she suddenly emphasised, her tone rising in sudden excitement. "I can never forget that he drank it alone."
A sigh or a suspicion of a sigh answered her. It came from one of her cousins, but I never knew from which. At its sound she shrank as if heart-pierced, and put up her hands—those tell-tale hands—and covered her ears; then she as quickly dropped them, and regarded the young men before her slowly, separately, and with a heartrending significance.
"I would so gladly have joined him in this attempt at old-time sociability had I but known it would have been his last," she said, and dropped her head again with a sob.
At this look and simple action a burden rolled from my heart. But upon the coroner and the physician lingering near my side, both look and words fell with a weight which made this investigation, if investigation it could be called, halt a moment.
"I do not understand you," observed the former after a momentary interval surcharged with deep emotion. "Was Mr. Gillespie in the habit of sharing his wine with those who sat at his board, that you feel the pathos of that lonely glass so keenly?"
"Yes. I never knew the dinner to close before without some sort of toast from one of his sons. It is the coincidence that affects me. But I should not have mentioned it. No one could have known that this was destined to be our last meal together."