“Why do you do that?” he asked. “Did you think I was going to discharge it?”
She smiled pitifully as she let her hands fall again.
“I have a dread of firearms,” she explained. “I always have had. Now they are simply terrible to me, and this one—”
“I understand,” said the coroner, with a slight glance in the direction of Durbin. They had evidently planned this test together on the strength of an idea suggested to Durbin by her former action when the memory of this shot was recalled to her.
“Your horror seems to lie in the direction of the noise they make,” continued her inexorable interlocutor. “One would say you had heard this pistol discharged.”
Instantly a complete breaking-up of her hitherto well maintained composure altered her whole aspect and she vehemently cried:
“I did, I did. I was on Waverley Avenue that night, and I heard the shot which in all probability ended my sister’s life. I walked farther than I intended; I strolled into the street which had such bitter memories for us and I heard—No, I was not in search of my sister. I had not associated my sister’s going out with any intention of visiting this house; I was merely troubled in mind and anxious and—and—”
She had overrated her strength or her cleverness. She found herself unable to finish the sentence, and so did not try. She had been led by the impulse of the moment farther than she had intended, and, aghast at her own imprudence, paused with her first perceptible loss of courage before the yawning gulf opening before her.
I felt myself seized by a very uncomfortable dread lest her concealments and unfinished sentences hid a guiltier knowledge of this crime than I was yet ready to admit.
The coroner, who is an older man than myself, betrayed a certain satisfaction but no dread. Never did the unction which underlies his sharpest speeches show more plainly than when he quietly remarked: