With a gesture the assistant coroner seemed to put aside this phase of the matter.
"Very well," said he. "But tell us, please, what happened after you reached home last night and saw your father, so unexpectedly."
"I was angry," said the young artist "I asked him what he was doing here."
"And then what?"
"He merely jeered at me. I looked at my sister; she seemed very ill, and I understood the cause of it at once, and tried to cross toward her."
"You tried to cross the room," said Osborne. "What was to prevent you?"
"My father tried to!" said the young man. "It was a way he had—I remember it from a boy—a love of threatening people—a desire to mock, a kind of joy in persecution. But he had forgotten that I had grown into a man, and I threw him out of my way as soon as he stepped into it."
"Well?" asked the questioner, after a pause.
"I saw that my sister had undergone a severe strain; she has been in bad health for some years. So I took her at once to her room."
"Your father remained in the sitting-room?"