blessed with more curiosity and made more frequent use of the chair
so conveniently placed for viewing the opposite house, you might
have been in a position to correct this inference. It would help
the police materially to know positively that she had no companion
in her fatal visit."

"Fatal?" he repeated, running his finger inside his neckband, which
suddenly seemed to have grown too tight for comfort. "Can it be
that my niece has been frightened to death in that old place? You
alarm me."

He did not look alarmed, but then he was not of an impressible
nature. Yet he was of the same human clay as the rest of us, and,
if he knew no more of this occurrence than he tried to make out,
could not be altogether impervious to what I had to say next.

"You have a right to be alarmed," I assented. "She was not
frightened to death, yet is she lying dead on the library floor."
Then, with a glance at the windows about me, I added lightly: "I
take it that a pistol-shot delivered over there could not be heard
in this room."

He sank rather melodramatically into his seat, yet his face and
form did not lose that sudden assumption of dignity which I had
observed in him ever since my entrance into the house.

"I am overwhelmed by this news," he remarked. "She has shot
herself? Why?"

"I did not say that she had shot herself," I carefully repeated.