"No; a few minutes later the maid saw him ascend the stairs once more, and the sister was with him then."
"But," cried Nora, a vague fear as to what this might lead to in her mind, "when the maid was questioned by the coroner's physician she said——"
But the investigator stopped her.
"As I have said, the maid is an altogether unimaginative creature, and it never occurred to her that anything short of blows or outcries could have anything to do with the crime. It was plain to me, as I talked to her, that she had even then no notion of the importance of what she was saying. She was simply answering questions. However, added to what the nurse had told Dr. Shower, her information was vital, indeed. Miss Wheeler had gone into the kitchen, if you recall her testimony, at a time when the three Burtons, father, son and daughter, were in the sitting-room. She said she had gone to tell the maid she might go to bed, and found she had already gone; also she remained in the kitchen for a space, attending to some duties of her own.
"During this interval young Burton must have gone to his room, probably sick at heart with the wrangling. His haste in emerging from the room, when the colored girl saw him later, and his pause to listen at the head of the stairs seem to indicate that something had attracted his attention below."
"Have you any idea what that was?" asked Scanlon.
"I am not yet sure. But this is how it builds up in my mind. When he reëntered the sitting-room he found his father dead and his sister in a faint. Having, of course, a full knowledge of certain nervous seizures to which his sister was subject, it rushed upon him that, in a moment of frenzy, she had killed her father."
"No!" cried Nora Cavanaugh. "Oh, no!"
"He's only supposing," said Scanlon, soothingly. "That's nothing at all."
"The young man's brain is a quick one," proceeded Ashton-Kirk; "any one who follows his work in the Standard knows that. He at once began to cast about, so it seems to me, for a way of concealing his sister's guilt. He took her to her room, and came down once more to the sitting-room. Allowing for a proper passage of time, he then asked the nurse to call in the police. To them he told the story which he afterward repeated to the coroner's physician: that his father had met his death in the space which had elapsed between his taking his sister to her room and his return to the sitting-room."