Stiff and stark in his last long sleep, Miser Farnham lay in his coffin awaiting burial—this was the end of his plotting and planning—his scheming and sinning.
The inquest was over, and Meg Dineheart, as chief witness, had hounded the hapless girl she hated to a terrible fate. Circumstantial evidence had pointed so strongly to Nita as the slayer of the miser, that she had been consigned to prison to await trial for murder.
There were few who could believe in the young girl's innocence, for the evidence against her was so overwhelmingly strong, and the motive for the murder so plain. And there were not lacking witnesses to prove that the girl had been desperate with despair and misery.
The Courtneys were the first to turn against her, and as witnesses they did their worst. They could tell the story from the beginning of Nita's falling in love with another man, and her fear and hatred of the miser; they could tell of the elopement, of the return, and of Nita's desperate despair and frantic grief when she learned that the miser had survived the dreadful railway accident. They could dwell with telling effect on her wickedness in encouraging Dorian's love when she was another man's wife, they could dilate on the attempted suicide in London.
All their stifled hatred of the girl who had benefited them could be aired now, and without one word of pity for her sorrows, they became old Meg's able allies in hounding her to her doom.
Even Dorian and Captain Van Hise had been compelled to give damning evidence against Nita. They had found her kneeling and then trying to escape from the murdered man's side, her dress and her hands all wet with the blood.
And there was no one else near, no one until old Meg had appeared. All the evidence given at the inquest had pointed straight to Nita's guilt, and there seemed but one extenuating circumstance—it seemed as if she must have suffered for months from emotional insanity.
In a moment of madness, enraged by the knowledge that her husband had contrived a cunning plot to expose her secret and humiliate her in the eyes of the man she madly loved, she had met the old man coming to Gray Gables, and in her blind rage sprang at him and murdered him.
The weapon had not been found, but it was decided to have been a very keen-bladed knife, and there were two wounds in the region of the heart that must either one have proved instantly fatal.