"It was this."
She handed to Bristow an open-faced gold watch. He read on the back of it the initials, "G. S. W."
"It's George Withers' watch," she said, "and, when I found it, he had not been on this side of Manniston Road, according to the story he told you and the chief of police."
Bristow was thinking intently, a frown creasing his forehead. He was wishing that she had not found the watch. He reminded himself of the hysterical condition she had been in the day before. Perhaps, after all, this story was nothing but an unconscious invention—a fantasy which she thought to be the truth.
"Why did you refuse yesterday to tell me this; and why do you volunteer it now?" he inquired, holding her glance with a cold, level look.
"I'm afraid you won't understand," she answered, a little smile lifting the corners of her mouth, a smile which, somehow, still had in it a great deal of sorrow. "Yesterday I was still under the influence of the way I had lived all my life, subjugated, as it were, by the fact that my older sister was my father's favourite and by the further fact that my sister's personality was stronger than mine—at least, I had been taught to think so.
"I don't want you to think I didn't love my sister. I did; but it made a cry-baby out of me. I always relied on others—do you see? But now, that influence is gone. I'm my own mistress; and I know it. I can and must do what strikes me as right."
Bristow, close student of human nature that he was, did understand. There flashed across his mind a passage he had read in something by George Bernard Shaw: that nobody ever loses a friend or relative by death without experiencing some measure of relief.
"Yes; I see what you mean," he assented; "its an instance of submerged personality—something of that sort."
"Mr. Braceway is working with you, isn't he?" she asked suddenly.