"Yes, miss, here."
She was not prepared for this refusal, and her eyes, full of entreaty, flashed from one face to another till they settled again on the coroner.
"I cannot," she protested. "Spare me! I do not seem to have full use of my faculties. My head swims—I cannot see—let me take it to the light over there—I am a nervous girl."
She had gradually drawn herself away from Leighton. The envelope which had been given her was trembling in her hand, and her eyes, wandering from George to Alfred, seemed to pray for some encouragement they were powerless to give. "I ought to be allowed the right to read the last words of one so dearly loved without feeling myself under the eyes of—of strangers," she finally declared with a certain pitiful access of hauteur certainly not natural to one of her manifestly generous temperament.
Was the shaft meant for me? I did not think so, but, in recognition of the hint conveyed, I stepped back and had almost reached the door when I heard the coroner say:
"If the words you find there have reference solely to your own interests, Miss Meredith, you will be allowed to read them in privacy. But if they refer in any way to the interests of the man who wrote it, you will yourself desire to read his words aloud, as the manner and meaning of his death is a mystery which you as well as all the other members of his household must desire to see immediately cleared up."
"Open it!" she cried, thrusting it into the hands of the physician, who by this time had rejoined the group. "And may God——"
She did not finish. The sacred name seemed to act as a restraint upon the passion in whose cause it had been invoked. With her back to them all she waited for the doctor to read the lines to which she seemed to attach so apprehensive an interest.
It was impossible for me to leave at a moment so critical. Watching the doctor, I saw him draw out the paper I had so carefully enclosed in an envelope, and after looking at it, turn it over and over in such astonishment and perplexity that we all caught the alarm and crowded about him for explanation. Alas, it was a simple one! The paper concerning which I had endured so many qualms of conscience, and from the reading of which the young girl had shrunk with every appearance of intolerable dread, proved upon opening it to be an absolutely blank one.
There was not upon its smooth surface so much as the faintest trace of words.