“Oh, Huey, is that you? Sit down, sit down. I’m nearly mad. Thank you for calling. You can go, Pro, and mind you remember.”
The Professor nodded to the visitor and left the room.
“Is it true, Bertha—Mrs. Booth, I should say—all this I read in the evening paper?” said the visitor as he drew nearer to that lady on the door closing.
“What the papers say, I don’t know, but they cannot say what is more horrible, more dreadful, than the truth!”
And then Bertha, at great length, with interjected sobs and disjointed fragments of narrative, related the tragedy of the morning.
Huey, or, to give him his name in full, Hubert Gosper, listened sympathetically, wondering perhaps somewhat, how, after such a shock, she had power to bring her mind to even an inconsequential narrative.
“What do you think of it?” she asked him. “The Professor will say nothing, but look awfully wise, like a magpie on a fence. How was it done—how could it be done? Could Alec have done it himself? He never told me his affairs. Do you know if he was troubled about them? It’s the uncertainty that’s so dreadful. People that did not know us might even think I had something to do with it.”
“You will pardon me, I hope, what I am going to say, and do not jump at a conclusion at once. But I, who know you both, am inclined to think you had something to do with it.”
“What! I?”
“Now don’t take fright in that way. According to what you say, the room is only to be entered by the door, and you locked and bolted that; so there remains only two possibilities—either that Alec, by some unheard-of means, stabbed himself, or that you did the deed.”