“I see that it may have some significance, but I don’t in the least understand it. I am quite overwhelmed and bewildered by the dreadful thing that has happened.”
“Naturally, you are,” the coroner said in a sympathetic tone, “and I am most reluctant to trouble you with questions under circumstances that must be so terrible to you. But we must find out the truth if we can.”
“Yes, I realize that,” she replied, “and thank you for your consideration.”
The coroner bowed, and after a brief pause, asked: “Did it never occur to you to engage a nurse to attend to deceased?”
“Yes. I suggested it more than once to deceased, but he wouldn’t hear of it. And I think he was right. There was nothing that a nurse could have done for him. He was not helpless and he was not continuously bed-ridden. He had a bell-push by his bedside and his secretary or the servants were always ready to do anything that he wanted done. The housemaid was most attentive to him. But he did not want much attention. He kept the books that he was reading on his bedside table and he liked to be left alone to read in peace. He felt that the presence of a nurse would have been disturbing.”
“And at night?”
“At night his bell-push was connected with a bell in the secretary’s bedroom. But he hardly ever used it. If his candle-lamp burned out he could put in a fresh candle from the box on his table; and he never seemed to want anything else.”
“Besides deceased and yourself, who were the inmates of the house?”
“There was my husband’s secretary, Mr. Wallingford, Miss Norris, the cook, Anne Baker, the housemaid, Mabel Withers, and the kitchenmaid, Doris Brown.”
“Why did deceased need a secretary? Did he transact much business?”