The Willings leaped to their feet. "This is ridiculous! This is an outrage! Why!" cried the husband, "his blind opposite our sitting-room was down all the time. There isn't even a hole through it where a shot would have passed!"
"Oh, isn't there?" asked Christina. "You see, it wasn't I who knew that!"
"What do you mean, you wicked girl! How dare you! Why, you heard the policeman say that it was only when he looked through our bedroom that he could see into Mr. Ingham's apartment—"
"And wasn't it in the bedroom that the body was found?"
"Miss Hope!" said the coroner, sternly, "I must ask you not to perpetrate jokes. You know perfectly well that your implied charge against Mrs. Willing is perfectly ridiculous—"
"Is it?" Christina interrupted, "she implied it about me!"
And for the first time she lifted to his a glance alight with the faintest mockery of malice; a wintry gleam, within the white exhaustion of her face. Then,—if all the time she had been playing a part—then, if ever, she was off her guard.
And she could not see what Herrick, from his angle, could see very well; that the coroner had been quietly slipping something from his desk into his hand, and was now dangling it behind his back.
This something was the scarf found on Ingham's table—that white scarf with its silky border, cloudy, watery, of blue glimmering into gray. How the tender, misty coloring recalled that room of Ingham's!
"Don't you know very well, Miss Hope," the coroner went on, "that Mrs. Willing had nothing whatever to do with Mr. Ingham's death?"