I had time, and we went into the vestry.
She sat down, and I waited for her to speak. She wasn't nervous, or embarrassed, as most people are in these interviews. Two things occurred to me about her; one was that she was, in a way, too far through, too mentally agitated, to be embarrassed; the other was that she was, quite unconsciously, posing a little, behaving as the heroine of one of her mother's novels might have behaved. One knows the situation in fiction—the desperate girl appealing out of her misery to the Christian priest for help. So many women have this touch of melodrama, this sense of a situation…. I believed that she was, as she sat there, in these two conditions simultaneously, exactly as I was simultaneously analysing her and wanting to be of what service I could.
She leant forward across the vestry table, locking and unlocking her hands.
'This is quite private, isn't it,' she said. 'As private as if…?'
'Quite,' I told her.
She drew a long, shivering breath, and leant her forehead on her clasped hands.
'You know,' she said, so low that I had to bend forward to catch it, 'what people are saying—what my people suspect about—about Oliver Hobart's death.'
'Yes, I know.'
'Well—it wasn't Mr. Gideon.'
'You know that?' I said quickly. And a great relief flooded me. I hadn't known, until that moment, because I had driven it under, how large a part of my brain believed that Gideon had perhaps done this thing.