“But why should he destroy himself?” he queried.
“Grief and remorse. Do you remember the disclosure he made to us this afternoon? It is a matter which might well have preyed upon his mind.”
“I see,” said the other thoughtfully. “Yes, perhaps you may be right.”
Their conversation was interrupted by the sound of a loud knocking downstairs.
“That must be the police,” observed Dr. Ravenshaw. “Let us go down.”
Chapter X
“Why should Robert commit suicide?”
That was the burden of Mrs. Pendleton’s cry, then and afterwards. There was an angry scene in the old cliff house between brother and sister before the events of that night were concluded. She utterly refused to accept Austin’s theory that their brother, with his own hand, had discharged the revolver bullet which had put an end to his life and ambitions. Sitting bolt upright in indignant amazement, she rejected the idea in the sharpest scorn. It was nothing to her that the police sergeant from the churchtown shared her brother’s view, and that Dr. Ravenshaw was passively acquiescent. She brushed aside the plausible web of circumstances with the impatient hand of an angry woman. They might talk till Doomsday, but they wouldn’t convince her that Robert, of all men, had done anything so disgraceful as take his own life. Arguments and events, the locked door and the inaccessible windows—pathetically masculine insistence on mere details—were wasted on her. The marshalled array of facts made not the slightest impression on her firm belief that Robert had not shot himself.
Shaking a large finger of angry import at Austin, and addressing herself to him alone, she had said—