"Oho! He had a pistol, had he?"
"Yes, sir. A 32-calibre. I bought it for him myself."
"That is a very good story," said Mr. Digby, who was a judge.
CHAPTER VII
HELD WITHOUT BAIL
THE theories and clues in the now celebrated case Orr related to Sylvia one after another as they reached him through different channels. To the story of Marie Leroy she listened, her face averted, without a word. The footpad theory she dismissed. It was absurd. But the suicide theory impressed her. Even to her mind it was not logical. Loftus was too cavalier, too supremely indifferent, to make it plausible. On the other hand, it disposed of the whole matter. Moreover, as she put it to Orr, what is suicide but the sinful end of a sinful life? "Who knows," she asked, "what sudden remorse he may have experienced that last night when he was alone there in the park?"
"Suicide," Orr had replied, "is assassination driven in. It is the crisis of a pre-existing condition, a condition wholly pathological, one which remorse may complicate but which it cannot directly induce. There was nothing whatever the matter with Loftus. He may have been sinful, as you express it, but he was sound. Besides, the man had no more conscience than a tom cat."
Nevertheless Sylvia clung to the theory. She had no other. Hopelessly she hoped that time would verify it. But she suffered acutely. Orr's account of Fanny's attitude frightened her. What frightened her most was the tale that Harris told. The latter she learned from the press.
Meanwhile she had gone to Mrs. Loftus. The old lady had not recognized her, or, rather, had mistaken her for someone else. "My boy is away, Fanny," she said, her head shaking as she spoke. "He is away. I don't know where." She began to whimper.
Sylvia, too, had wept. It was pitiful. The proud, arrogant woman Fate had reduced to a cowering crone.