"Which end came down, Miss Hodge?"
"The middle end," Miss Hodge said, looking with something like affection on the girl, though she had been on the point of letting her go without putting her out of suspense.
A great wave of colour rushed into O'Donnell's normally pale face. "Oh, thank you!" she said, in a whisper, and almost ran out of the room.
"Poor wretch," said Lux. "That was a horrible moment for her."
"It is most unlike Miss Rouse to be careless about apparatus," Henrietta said thoughtfully.
"You are not suggesting that O'Donnell is not telling the truth?"
"No, no. What she said was obviously true. It was the natural thing for her to take the wall end where she would have the help of the rib-stalls. But I still cannot see how it happened. Apart from Miss Rouse's natural carefulness, a pin would have to be very badly put in indeed for it to be so far not in that it let the boom come down. And the hoisting rope so slack that it let the boom fall nearly three feet!"
v "I suppose Giddy couldn't have done something to it accidentally?"
"I don't know what he could have done to it. You can't alter a pin put in at that height without stretching up deliberately to it. It is not as if it were something he might possibly touch with his apparatus. And much as he prides himself on the strength of The Abhorrence there is no suction that will pull a pin out from under a boom."
"No." Lux thought a little. "Vibration is the only kind of force that would alter a pin's position. Some kind of tremor. And there was nothing like that."