“No, I wasn’t,” said Natalie herself, suddenly reappearing. “On the contrary, I had persuaded Mr. Stannard, that very day, not to ask me to pose for him, except as a fully draped model. He had apologised for his previous insistence, and I looked for no more trouble on that score. I was trying to get up courage to ask him to let Barry be engaged to me, but I hadn’t accomplished that.”
“If Mrs. Stannard had had any angry words with her husband just before he was attacked, could you have overheard them?” asked Roberts.
“I don’t think so. Not unless they had spoken very loudly. The door to the Terrace was closed, or almost closed. And I was not thinking about what might be going on in the house. Unless there had been an especial disturbance, I should not have noticed it.”
“Yet you heard that gasping cry for help through the closed door.”
“Yes. But that was not a faint gasp, it was a penetrating sort of a cry. An attempted scream, I should describe it.”
Roberts looked at her closely. Was she innocent or was she an infant Machiavelli?
“It is a difficult situation,” he said, with a sigh. “We have but two eye-witnesses. Each naturally accuses the other and denies her own guilt. One speaks truth and one falsehood. How can we distinguish which one tells the truth?”
“Don’t say eye-witnesses,” objected Natalie. “I didn’t see the crime committed. If I think Joyce did it, it’s only because I went in and found her there and nobody else about.”
“Suppose,” and Bobsy Roberts looked her straight in the face, “suppose Eric Stannard held in his hand your picture,—that etching, you know, and suppose he was, in a way, talking to it. Or, say, he wasn’t talking to it, but what he did say, and what his wife overheard, was said while he held your picture, and she thought he referred to you. Then she, in a jealous fury, resented the idea of his giving you the emeralds, and——”
“I didn’t want the emeralds,” said Natalie, coldly, “and I certainly didn’t want Eric to marry me, but even granting your premises right, it takes suspicion of the murder from me, and places it on Joyce.”