“Loretta, I regret to put this question, but after your replies I owe it to the jury, if not to the parties themselves, to make Miss Tuttle’s position in this household thoroughly understood. Do you think she was a welcome visitor in this house?”
The girl pursed up her lips, glanced at the lady and gentleman whose feelings she was supposed to pass comment on, and seemed to lose heart. Then, as they failed to respond to her look of appeal, she strove to get the better of her sense of shame and, with a somewhat injured air, replied:
“I can only repeat what I once heard said about this by Mr. Jeffrey himself. Miss Tuttle had just left the diningroom and Mrs. Jeffrey was standing in one of her black moods, with her hand on the top of her chair, ready to go but forgetting to do so. I was there, but neither of them noticed me; he was staring at her, and she was looking down. Neither seemed at ease. Suddenly he spoke and asked, ‘Why must Cora remain with us?’ She started and her look grew strange and frightened. ‘Because I want her to,’ she cried. ‘I can not live without Cora.”’
These words, so different from what we were expecting, caused a sensation in the room and consequently a stir. As the noise of shifting feet and moving heads began to be heard in all directions, Miss Tuttle’s head drooped a little, but Francis Jeffrey did not betray any sign of feeling or even of attention. The coroner, embarrassed, perhaps, by this exhibition of silent misery so near him, hesitated a little before he put his next question. Loretta, on the contrary, had gathered courage with every word she spoke and now looked ready for anything.
“It was Mrs. Jeffrey, then, who clung most determinedly to her sister?” the coroner finally suggested.
“I have told you what she said.”
“Yet these sisters spent but little time together?”
“Very little; as little as two persons could who lived together in one house.”
This statement, which seemed such a contradiction to her former one, increased the interest; and much disappointment was covertly shown when the coroner veered off from this topic and brusquely inquired “Did you ever know Mr. and Mrs. Jeffrey to have any open rupture?”
The answer was a decided one.