“Theodore Wing’s mother.”
“She is, then, still alive?”
“She is still alive,” he said; “and unless concerned in this recent tragedy, as safe as if the knowledge of the facts had remained locked in her breast, as they were at the time of Judge Parlin’s death. If she was concerned in this tragedy, then it is that, and not the fact that another has learned the truth, that destroys her safety.”
Even at so serious a moment, she could not avoid playing with the subject:
“Do you think her concerned in the murder?”
“It is what I am not certain of,” he said frankly. “It is the murder that has revealed this—misfortune. I can find no motive that can account for her connection with the affair.”
“I am of the opinion she had nothing to do with it,” she said, quite positively. “If all this is true, she would naturally have no love for the child of her mistake; but you surely cannot think on that account that she was guilty of murder—the cruelest murder one could imagine under the circumstances! Certainly, if there was anything to tempt to murder, anything that would have advantaged her, it passed long ago.”
“I have thought of that,” he said, “but is it not possible that something may have occurred recently that alarmed her—something that made her feel it necessary to go to extremes to which, naturally, she would be unwilling to resort, excepting under the direst necessity?”
“I do not think,” she said, lifting her head with some imperiousness, “that such a woman is likely to be alarmed. She would have lived that down long since. More than that, she would have brains enough to see that a crime, more than all else, would endanger her secret. This woman could not have been brainless.”
“Far from it,” he assured her. “I am inclined to rate her as the ablest woman I have ever met.”