“In the ones he wore to dinner the night before.”
It was true; I had not gone to bed that night. There was too much on my mind. But to them it would look as if I had sat up ready for the expected alarm.
“Was he in these same clothes when you finally entered your uncle’s room?”
“Certainly; there was no time then for changing.”
These questions might have been addressed to me instead of to him. They would have been answered with as much truth; but the suggestiveness would have been lacking and in this I recognized my second enemy. I now knew that the Coroner was against me.
A few persons there may have recognized this fact also. But they were all too much in sympathy with Edgar to resent it. I made no show of doing so nor did I glance again at Orpha to see the effect on her of these attacks leveled at me with so much subtlety. I felt, in the humiliation of the moment, that unless I stood cleared of every suspicion, I could never look her again in the face.
Meanwhile the inquiry had reached the event for which all were waiting—the destruction of the one will and the acknowledgment by the dying man that the envelope which held the other was empty.
“Were you near enough to see the red mark on the one he had ordered burned?”
“Yes; I took note of it.”
“Had you seen it before?”