"None, if we can believe the four members of the Parrish family who
were seated at the other end of the room."

"And you do believe them?"

"Would a whole family lie--and needlessly? They never knew the
woman--father, maiden aunt and two boys, clear-eyed, jolly young
chaps whom even the horror of this tragedy, perpetrated as it were
under their very nose, cannot make serious for more than a passing
moment."

"It wouldn't seem so."

"Yet they swear up and down that nobody crossed the room towards
Miss Challoner."

"So they tell me."

"She fell just a few feet from the desk where she had been writing.
No word, no cry, just a collapse and sudden fall. In olden days
they would have said, struck by a bolt from heaven. But it was a
bolt which drew blood; not much blood, I hear, but sufficient to
end life almost instantly. She never looked up or spoke again.
What do you make of it, Gryce?"

"It's a tough one, and I'm not ready to venture an opinion yet. I
should like to see the desk you speak of, and the spot where she
fell."