“They say it’s the girl from the Wayside Inn. Oh, Tom, did you go and meet her?” asked Mrs. Henderson, piteously.
“I never went near her; but, mother, a confounded thing has happened. I was ass enough to write to her to ask her to meet me; I wanted to buy her off, in fact. When I was almost a boy I got entangled with her, and she was always urging some claims or other that she thought she had against me, and I wanted to pay her a big sum and be done with it. Well, I asked her to meet me last night, but I did not go. I went out for a short time, as you remember, and then I turned back and came home. If you are questioned you must say I was home early, or never out. Do you understand? They will want to throw suspicion on me on account of the confounded letter I wrote. The girl must have gone, I suppose, and shot herself because I did not go, for her father’s revolver was lying beside her.”
Mrs. Henderson had turned absolutely white during this garbled narrative. From this hour she never doubted her son’s guilt. She looked at him with terror-stricken eyes, but no word came from her trembling lips.
“You must say I was home early; only out a few minutes,” repeated Henderson, doggedly, and almost with a gasp Mrs. Henderson whispered out a few words.
“You were—at home early,” she said.
“That’s it; you mayn’t be asked, but that’s your answer, and now I’ll go out for a walk, for I’ve a disgusting headache still.”
He turned and went out of the room as he spoke, and Mrs. Henderson leaned against the table for support.
“Oh! my unhappy boy,” she murmured with her white lips; “my miserable boy!”
In a few minutes she saw him go down the avenue smoking, and then with feeble, trembling footsteps, as though suddenly aged, she proceeded to her son’s bedroom. She locked the door, and then drew out her housewifely bunch of keys. With these, one after the other, she tried to unlock the drawer in Henderson’s wardrobe, where she had seen him hide the coat he had worn the night before, and from which he had cut the stained sleeve. At last one of her keys opened the drawer, and with shaking fingers Mrs. Henderson drew out the coat she had seen him roll up and place there. With a sickening dread she now unrolled it. Half of one of the sleeves was gone as she knew, but a faint stain—a smudge, as it were, on the breast—quickly attracted her attention.