After a while, she relapsed into her quiet sobbing.
"I think maybe he done tuk dat key. I knows he done lef' me durin' de night, an' I b'lieve he done come back. But I ain't gwine say nothin'. Maybe I don' know. Maybe I is mistuk. De whole thing done got too mix' up fuh me. Maybe he kilt her an' maybe he ain' been nigh de place. But I wish I coul' know. My holy Lawd! I wish I done know all dat done happen.
"Dat key fallin' on de flo'. Who done drap it dar ef Perry ain' drapped it? Dat's whut I'd like to know. Ef he ain' had dat key, ain' nobody had it."
She lay down, weeping and sobbing from unhappiness and terror. Bristow and Greenleaf would have given much to have known her suspicions, suspicions which amounted to a moral certainty.
On the sleeping porch of No. 5, Manniston Road, Maria Fulton lay awake a long time and tortured herself by reviewing again and again the thoughts that had crushed her during the day. Miss Kelly, on a cot at the foot of the girl's bed, heard her stirring restlessly but could not know in the darkness how her long, slender fingers tore at the bed-covering, nor how her face was drawn with pain.
"The overturning of that chair,"—her mind whirled the events before her—"the sound of that whisper, that man's whisper, and the sight of that foot! He wore rubbers. I know he did. He always wears them when it's even cloudy. It was he! It was he!"
Her nails dug into her palms as she fought for something like self-control.
"If it was not he? I would never have fainted—never. That's what made me faint, the sickening, undeniable knowledge that that was who it was. And I loved him! But—but the rubber-shod foot, the size of it! Am I sure? Could it have been——"
She groaned so that Miss Kelly lifted her head from her own pillow and listened intently, trying to determine whether the sufferer was asleep or awake.
"He's not stupid," she swept on, closing mutinous lips against the repetition of sound. "He knew Enid could do nothing—nothing more. I don't understand. Oh, I don't understand! I wonder now why I said I heard nothing.