made no mistake. It was the gentleman you name, and no other whom you saw on this stoop at this hour?”
“I am very sure that it was he. I am sorry——”
But the Coroner gave him no opportunity to finish.
“You and Mr. Van Burnam are friends, you say, and it was light enough for you to recognize each other; then you probably spoke?”
“No, we did not. I was thinking—well of other, things,” and here he allowed the ghost of a smile to flit suggestively across his firm-set lips. “And Mr. Van Burnam seemed preoccupied also, for, as far as I know, he did not even look my way.”
“And you did not stop?”
“No, he did not look like a man to be disturbed.”
“And this was at four on the morning of the eighteenth?”
“At four.”
“You are certain of the hour and of the day?”
“I am certain. I should not be standing here if I were not very sure of my memory. I am sorry,” he began again, but he was stopped as peremptorily as before by the Coroner.
“Feeling has no place in an inquiry like this.” And the witness was dismissed.
Mr. Stone, who had manifestly given his evidence under compulsion, looked relieved at its termination. As he passed back to the room from which he had come, many only noticed the extreme elegance of his form and the proud cast of his head, but I saw more than these. I saw the look of regret he cast at his friend Howard.
A painful silence followed his withdrawal, then the Coroner spoke to the jury:
“Gentlemen, I leave you to judge of the importance of this testimony. Mr. Stone is a well-known man of unquestionable integrity, but perhaps Mr. Van Burnam can explain how he came to visit his father’s house at four o’clock in the morning on that memorable night, when according to his latest testimony he left his wife there at twelve. We will give him the opportunity.”
“There is no use,” began the young man from the place where he sat. But gathering courage even while speaking, he came rapidly forward, and facing Coroner and jury once more, said with a false kind of energy that imposed upon no one:
“I can explain this fact, but I doubt if you will accept my explanation. I was at my father’s house at that hour, but not in it. My restlessness drove me back to my wife, but not finding the keys in my pocket, I came down the stoop again and went away.”
“Ah, I see now why you prevaricated this morning in regard to the time when you missed those keys.”
“I know that my testimony is full of contradictions.”
“You feared to have it known that you were on the stoop of your father’s house for the second time that night?”
“Naturally, in face of the suspicion I perceived everywhere about me.”
“And this time you did not go in?”
“No.”
“Nor ring the bell?”
“No.”
“Why not, if you left your wife within, alive and well?”
“I did not wish to disturb her. My purpose was not strong enough to surmount the least difficulty. I was easily deterred from going where I had little wish to be.”
“So that you merely went up the stoop and down again at the time Mr. Stone saw you?”
“Yes, and if he had passed a minute sooner he would have seen this: seen me go up, I mean, as well as seen me come down. I did not linger long in the doorway.”
“But you did linger there a moment?”
“Yes; long enough to hunt for the keys and get over my astonishment at not finding them.”
“Did you notice Mr. Stone going by on Twenty-first Street?”
“No.”
“Was it as light as Mr. Stone has said?”
“Yes, it was light.”
“And you did not notice him?”
“No.”
“Yet you must have followed very closely behind him?”
“Not necessarily. I went by the way of Twentieth Street, sir. Why, I do not know, for my rooms are uptown. I do not know why I did half the things I did that night.”
“I can readily believe it,” remarked the Coroner.
Mr. Van Burnam’s indignation rose.
“You are trying,” said he, “to connect me with the fearful death of my wife in my father’s lonely house. You cannot do it, for I am as innocent of that death as you are, or any other person in this assemblage. Nor did I pull those shelves down upon her as you would have this jury think, in my last thoughtless visit to my father’s door. She died according to God’s will by her own hand or by means of some strange and unaccountable accident known only to Him. And so you will find, if justice has any place in these investigations and a manly intelligence be allowed to take the place of prejudice in the breasts of the twelve men now sitting before me.”
And bowing to the Coroner, he waited for his dismissal, and receiving it, walked back not to his lonely corner, but to his former place between his father and brother, who received him with a wistful air and strange looks of mingled hope and disbelief.
“The jury will render their verdict on Monday morning,” announced the Coroner, and adjourned the inquiry.
Book II.
The Windings of a Labyrinth
Chapter XVI.
Cogitations
My cook had prepared for me a most excellent dinner, thinking that I needed all the comfort possible after a day of such trying experiences. But I ate little of it; my thoughts were too busy, my mind too much exercised. What would be the verdict of the jury, and could this especial jury be relied upon to give a just verdict?
At seven I had left the table and was shut up in my own room. I could not rest till I had fathomed my own mind in regard to the events of the day.
The question—the great question, of course, now—was how much of Howard’s testimony was to be believed, and whether he was, notwithstanding his asseverations to the contrary, the murderer of his wife. To most persons the answer seemed easy. From the expression of such people as I had jostled in leaving the court-room, I judged that his sentence had already been passed in the minds of most there present. But these hasty judgments did not influence me. I hope I look deeper than the surface, and my mind would not subscribe to his guilt, notwithstanding the bad impression made upon me by his falsehoods and contradictions.
Now why would not my mind subscribe to it? Had sentiment got the better of me, Amelia Butterworth, and was I no longer capable of looking a thing squarely in the face? Had the Van Burnams, of all people in the world, awakened my sympathies at the cost of my good sense, and was I disposed to see virtue in a man in whom every circumstance as it came to light revealed little but folly and weakness? The lies he had told—for there is no other word to describe his contradictions—would have been sufficient under most circumstances to condemn a man in my estimation. Why, then, did I secretly look for excuses to his conduct?
Probing the matter to the