But she spared me that, either because she did not know how to obtrude it without help from the Coroner, or because she had enough right feeling not to emphasize the suspicion already roused against me by her previous testimony.
Grateful for this much grace, I restrained my own anxieties and listened intently for what else she had to say, in the old hope that some word would yet fall from her lips or some glance escape from her eye which would give me the clew to the hand which had really lifted that glass and set it down a little further along the shelf.
I thought I was on its track when she came to the visit she had paid to the room above in the company of Edgar and Orpha. But I heard little new. The facts elicited were well-known ones. They had approached the cabinet together, looked into it together, and, pushing the bottles about, brought out the one for which they were seeking from the very place in the rear of the shelf where she had put it herself when told that it would not be required any longer.
“Yes, that is the bottle,” she declared, as the Coroner lifted a small phial from the table before him and held it up in her sight and in that of the jury. As he did this, I could scarcely hide the sickening thrill which for a moment caused everything to turn black around me. For the label was written large and the word Poison had a ghastly look to one who had loved Edgar Quenton Bartholomew. When I could see and hear again, Wealthy was saying:
“A few drops wouldn’t be missed. My memory isn’t good enough for me to be sure of a fact like that.”
Evidently she had been asked if on taking the phial from the shelf she had noticed any diminution of its contents since she had last handled it.
“You say that you pushed the bottles aside in order to get at this one. Was that necessary? Could you not have reached in over them and lifted it out?”
“I never thought of doing that; none of us did. We were all anxious to satisfy ourselves as to whether or not the bottle was there and just took the quickest way we knew of finding out.”
“But you could have got hold of it in the way I suggested? Reached in, I mean, and pulled it out without disarranging the other bottles?”
She stopped to think; contracting her brows and stealing what I felt sure was a look at Edgar.