The next minute the coroner had concentrated the attention of us all by saying gravely to the three young men before him:
"You, as sons of Mr. Gillespie, will surely see the justice of my making an immediate attempt to find out how and when your father took the poison, which, to all appearance, has ended his invaluable life." Then, as no one replied, he added quietly:
"A bottle is missing; the bottle of sherry from which he drank a glass since supper. Will you grant me leave to search the house till I find it? So little time has passed, it must assuredly be somewhere within reach."
"I can tell you where it is," rejoined one of the brothers. "I wanted a drink. I had friends upstairs, and I came down and carried off the first bottle I saw. You will find it in my room above. We all drank our share, so there can have been no harm in it."
It was George who spoke, and I now saw why his lips had moved when this bottle was first mentioned.
The coroner showed relief, yet made a movement singularly like a signal towards the rear hall which I had supposed vacant since the servants had been sent out of it. That he was speaking in the meantime did not detract from the suggestiveness of the gesture.
"You and your friends drank of it?" he repeated. "Very good. That settles one doubt." And he waited, or appeared to wait, for some event connected, as I felt sure, with the step we all could now hear moving in that hall.
Suddenly these steps grew louder, and a young man, evidently as much of a stranger to the occupants of the house as to myself, approached from the servants' staircase with a bottle in his hand.
Quietly the coroner took it, quietly he held it up before the last speaker, without attempting to explain or to apologise in any way for the presence of the man of whom he had just made such dramatic use.
"Is this the bottle you mean?"