Miss Bostal considered.
“If you go by the fields, it must be about a mile and a half. By the road, I should think nearly two miles.”
At this point the superintendent of police nodded to the coroner, to express his assent to this calculation.
“And now tell me, if you please, what time it was when you left the cottage, when you saw the last of the deceased, that is to say?”
“It was about ten minutes past seven.”
“How did you fix the time?”
“I looked at my watch when we got back home again, to see if it was time to light the fire in the dining-room for my father’s return home. And it was then five-and-twenty minutes past seven.”
“Then you reckon that you did the walk in a quarter of an hour?”
“Yes. It is about three-quarters of a mile, by the way we came over the fields.”
There was a short pause, and the listening crowd, now more on the alert than ever, waited breathlessly for the coroner’s next question. It came in a rather surprising form.