"I feel ready to declare, sirs, that none of them did. She was not killed by the falling of the cabinet upon her."
"Not killed by the falling shelves! Why not? Were they not sufficiently heavy, or did they not strike her in a vital place?"
"They were heavy enough, and they struck her in a way to kill her if she had not been already dead when they fell upon her. As it was, they simply bruised a body from which life had already departed."
As this was putting it very plainly, many of the crowd who had not been acquainted with these facts previously, showed their interest in a very unmistakable manner; but the Coroner, ignoring these symptoms of growing excitement, hastened to say:
"This is a very serious statement you are making, doctor. If she did not die from the wounds inflicted by the objects which fell upon her, from what cause did she die? Can you say that her death was a natural one, and that the falling of the shelves was merely an unhappy accident following it?"
"No, sir; her death was not natural. She was killed, but not by the falling cabinet."
"Killed, and not by the cabinet? How then? Was there any other wound upon her which you regard as mortal?"
"Yes, sir. Suspecting that she had perished from other means than appeared, I made a most rigid examination of her body, when I discovered under the hair in the nape of the neck, a minute spot, which, upon probing, I found to be the end of a small, thin point of steel. It had been thrust by a careful hand into the most vulnerable part of the body, and death must have ensued at once."
This was too much for certain excitable persons present, and a momentary disturbance arose, which, however, was nothing to that in my own breast.
So! so! it was her neck that had been pierced, and not her heart. Mr. Gryce had allowed us to think it was the latter, but it was not this fact which stupefied me, but the skill and diabolical coolness of the man who had inflicted this death-thrust.