“It seems to,” said Mr. Monroe; and then, unable longer to keep up her brave resistance, Florence Lloyd fainted.
Mrs. Pierce wrung her hands and moaned in a helpless fashion. Elsa started forward to attend her young mistress, but it was the two neighbors who were jurors, Mr. Hamilton and Mr. Porter, who carried the unconscious girl from the room.
Gregory Hall looked concerned, but made no movement to aid, and I marvelled afresh at such strange actions in a man betrothed to a particularly beautiful woman.
Several women in the audience hurried from the room, and in a few moments the two jurors returned.
“Miss Lloyd will soon be all right, I think,” said Mr. Porter to the coroner. “My wife is with her, and one or two other ladies. I think we may proceed with our work here.”
There was something about Mr. Lemuel Porter that made men accept his dictum, and without further remark Mr. Monroe called the next witness, Mr. Roswell Randolph, and a tall man, with an intellectual face, came forward.
While the coroner was putting the formal and preliminary questions to Mr. Randolph, Parmalee quietly drew my attention to a whispered conversation going on between Elsa and Louis.
If this girl had fainted instead of Miss Lloyd, I should not have been surprised for she seemed on the very verge of nervous collapse. She seemed, too, to be accusing the man of something, which he vigorously denied. The girl interested me far more than the Frenchman. Though of the simple, rosy-cheeked type of German, she had an air of canniness and subtlety that was at variance with her naive effect. I soon concluded she was far more clever than most people thought, and Parmalee's whispered words showed that he thought so too.
“Something doing in the case of Dutch Elsa, eh?” he said; “she and Johnny Frenchy have cooked up something between them.”
“Nothing of any importance, I fancy,” I returned, for Miss Lloyd's swoon seemed to me a surrender, and I had little hope now of any other direction in which to look.