The coroner looked at her kindly, but it was no part of his duty to allow any sympathy he might feel for the witness to interfere with his endeavour to reach the truth. He therefore urged her to relate the circumstances to which she alluded; in other words, to explain how this letter addressed collectively to her three cousins came to be written.
She grew still more distressed.
"Does not the letter explain itself?" she remonstrated. "Spare me, I pray. My uncle's sons have been brothers to me. Do not make me repeat what passed between my uncle and myself on that unhappy morning when he first unburdened himself of his intolerable grief."
"I fear that I cannot spare you," replied the coroner; "but I will grant you a short respite while this letter, or such portions of it as bear upon Mr. Gillespie's death, is being read to the jury. Gentlemen, it is written in Mr. Gillespie's own hand, and it is dated just a month prior to his unhappy demise. Miss Meredith, you may sit."
She fell rather than sank into the chair offered her, and for a moment I felt myself the prey of a boundless indignation as I witnessed the callousness shown towards her by the three men who up to this time had presumably regarded her with more or less affection. To me her position called for their especial sympathy. The heroism she evinced was the heroism of a loving woman who sacrifices herself, and what is dearest to her, to her idea of justice and law. And while such action may be easy for a man, it is hard beyond expression for a woman, who, as we know, is much more apt to listen to the voice of her heart than to any abstract appeal of right and justice. Yet these same relatives of hers sat still and scarcely looked her way, though she glanced repeatedly and with heartrending appeal in their direction.
I am quite ready to admit that I was too prejudiced a witness to be just to these men. Had I not myself been under the influence of a sudden and violent passion, I would have seen that Alfred needed sympathy as well as she; for Alfred was the man most menaced by the contents of the letter now on the point of being read; and he knew this as certainly as she did.
As this letter is better known to you than it was to me up to this hour, I leave you to judge of its effect upon the jury and the excited crowd of spectators thronging the room at every point. Heads which had wagged in doubt now drooped in heaviest depression; and while all eyes seemed to shrink from an attempt to read the three white faces on the witnesses' bench, the attention of all was concentrated there, and it was with quite a sense of shock that Dr. Frisbie's voice was heard rising again in renewed examination of the young lady whose precipitate action had brought to public notice this touching letter of a heartbroken father.
His first question was a leading one. Had Mr. Gillespie followed up his former confidences by any further allusions to the attempt which had been made upon his life?
Her answer was a direct negative. Though she had detected in her uncle signs of great unhappiness, he had held no further conversation with her on this topic, and life had gone on as usual in the great house.
"But he talked of poisons, and refused to take any more of the medicine which came so near killing him?"