“How dare you?” cried the coroner. “What do you mean by this? Who are you?”
“I have come rushing over from Tewkesbury to clear Abel Crew,” returned Cathy, recovering her breath after the fight. “The pills that killed the children were my pills.”
The commotion this avowal caused in the room was beyond describing. The coroner stared, the jury all turned to look at the speaker, the crowd trod upon one another.
“And sorry to my heart I am that it should have been so,” went on Cathy. “I loved those two dear little ones as if they were my own, and I’d rather my pills had killed myself. Just look at that, please, Mr. Coroner.”
The ease with which Cathy spoke to the official gentleman, the coolness with which she put down a pill-box on the green cloth before him, took the room by surprise. As Ann Dovey remarked, later, “She must ha’ learnt that there manner in her travels with young Parrifer.”
“What is this?” questioned the coroner, curtly, picking up the box.
“Perhaps you’ll ask Mr. Crew whether he knows it, sir, before I say what it is,” returned Cathy.
The coroner had opened it. It contained seven pills; just the size of the other pills, and looking exactly like them. On the lid and on the box was the private mark spoken of by Abel Crew.
“That is my box, sir; and these—I am certain of it—are my pills,” spoke Abel, earnestly, bending over the shoulder of the first juryman to look into the box. “The box and the pills that I gave to Mrs. Reed.”
“And so they are, Abel Crew,” rejoined Cathy, emphatically. “The week before last, which I was spending at home at father’s, I changed the one pill-box for the other, inadvertent, you see”—with a nod to the coroner—“and took the wrong box away with me. And I wish both boxes had been in the sea before I’d done it.”