“I don’t think you ought to try to throw fresh obloquy upon the dead,” said Miss Bostal, gravely. “He was quite sober when we saw him, and it must have been very little later when he died.”
“But if the fall in my uncle’s garden had killed him—”
“The blow, you mean,” interposed Miss Bostal.
“It would have killed him at once,” protested Nell. “You can’t be stunned and recover entirely, and then die of the blow that stunned you an hour afterward. Is that possible, colonel?”
“I have never heard of such a case that I know of,” said he, with reserve. “But I should not like to give an opinion until we have heard the doctors’ evidence.”
“But didn’t you hear what the doctor said? Didn’t you wait to hear it?” persisted Nell.
“I waited to hear it, but I didn’t succeed,” said the colonel, in an offended tone.
The fact was that he and a number of other nobodies, who on one account or other considered themselves persons of great importance in the neighborhood, had been cruelly snubbed by the two medical men who had made an examination of the body when it had been brought into the town. For, after making their examination, they had both passed out of the building and through the throng which awaited them as quickly as possible, and had both declined at that stage to give a definite opinion as to the cause of death. So all the little-great men felt grossly insulted, and departed to their respective homes at a white heat of indignation.
“For all I know, they may bring it in ‘Murder’ against this fellow, King,” said the colonel, irritably, not with any feeling of animosity against the person in question, but in order to get Nell to sympathize with his own grievance.
But the effect of his words upon the girl was electrical.