“Maybe it was and maybe it wasn’t.”
“You know of other reasons?”
“I have eyes in my head,” she said. “But I’m not going to talk about it. Shall we be getting on now, sir?”
I tried another lead:
“I hadn’t seen my uncle in five years, you know. He seemed terribly changed. He was not an old man, by any means, yet when I saw him at the funeral—” I paused, expectantly.
To my relief, she responded readily:
“He looked that way for the last few months, especially the last week. I spoke to him about it, two days before—before it happened, sir—and told him he’d do well to see the doctor again. But he cut me off short. My sister took sick the same day, and I was called out of town. The next time I saw him, he was—”
She paused, and then went on, sobbing:
“To think of him lyin’ there in that awful place, and callin’ and callin’ for me, as I know he must, and me not around to hear him!”
As she stopped again, suddenly, and threw a suspicious glance at me, I hastened to insert a matter-of-fact question: