Sedgewick concluded that it was possible, since the thing must have happened. He was ordinarily a particularly light sleeper. Was there ever a servant who confessed to being anything else? He had been to a theatre that evening, and may have slept sounder than usual.
"Did none of the other men hear anything?"
John, footman, had heard the dog bark.
John was duly sworn, and stated that he had been awakened by hearing the dog, an Irish terrier, and he had sat up in bed and listened; but the dog had given only that one bark, by which he, John, concluded that the animal, which slept on a mat outside his room, had been dreaming. Interrogated as to time, he had heard the hall clock strike five not very long after the dog barked. It might be a quarter of an hour, or it might be half an hour.
On this followed the interrogation of stable servants, as to the gates opening into Chilton Street, the result of which showed that the stable gates had not been locked that morning. It was broad daylight when the grooms finished their work and turned in for a morning sleep. The last of the stable servants to retire had heard the clocks strike four as he went to his bedroom.
Mrs. Provana was there to answer all further questions concerning herself.
She stood up by the table, facing the coroner. She stood there, an exquisite figure, slender and erect, her countenance and her attitude sublime in composure, grace and refinement in every line.
The few of her friends who had found their way into the court, and who were standing discreetly in the background, Mr. Symeon, Mr. Amphlett and Lady Susan, Father Cyprian Hammond, Claude Rutherford, Eustace Lyon, the poet—these admired and wondered.
With no vestige of colour in cheek or lip, with eyes that had grown larger in the new horror of her life, yet unutterably calm, with not one passing tremor in the low voice, and with not one instant of hesitation, she answered the coroner's questions.