Here the curtain at the drawing-room door was disturbed and a pallid face looked forth.
"I pray you," came in entreaty from Hope's set lips, "spare this stranger, whose only crime has been to show kindness to a man he did not know, in an extremity he did not understand. Search me; search Claire; but do not subject this gentleman to an act so injurious. I swear that the phial is not on him! I swear——"
She hardly knew what she was saying. The heaped-up excitements of the last two hours were fast unsettling her reason.
She held out her hands imploringly. "I don't know why I care so much," she murmured in fresh expostulation, "but I feel as if I could not bear it."
From that moment I loved her, though I knew this interposition in my behalf sprang from her womanly instinct rather than from the spontaneous impulse of a freshly awakened heart. I must have shown how deeply I was moved, for the coroner looked distressed, though he gave no signs of modifying his intention, and I was beginning to empty my pockets before his eyes, when Sweetwater's expressive countenance showed a sudden change, and he rushed again to the rear. Here he stood a moment before the dining-room door, striking his forehead in wrathful indecision; then he disappeared within, only to shout aloud in another instant:
"Fool! fool! And I noticed when I first came in that the clock had stopped. See! see!"
We were at his side in an instant. He was standing by the mantelpiece, with the heavy French clock tilted up before our eyes. Under it, tucked away in the space allowed to the pendulum, we saw a small homœopathic bottle. There was one drop of liquid at the bottom, which even before Mr. Gryce lifted the bottle to his nose we recognised by its smell to be prussic acid.
The phial which had held the deadly dose was found.