Mr. Ferris listened with surprise and great interest.
“That seems to settle the question,” he said.
But it was now Hickory’s turn to shake his head.
“I don’t know,” he remonstrated. “I have sometimes thought she saw through the trick and turned it to her own advantage.”
“How to her own advantage?”
“To talk in such a way as to make us think Mansell was guilty.”
“Stuff!” said Byrd; “that woman?”
“More unaccountable things have happened,” was the weak reply of Hickory, his habitual state of suspicion leading him more than once into similar freaks of folly.
“Sir,” said Mr. Byrd, confidingly, to the District Attorney, “let us run over this matter from the beginning. Starting with the supposition that the explanation she gave you last night was the true one, let us see if the whole affair does not hang together in a way to satisfy us all as to where the real guilt lies. To begin, then, with the meeting in the woods—”
“Wait,” interrupted Hickory; “there is going to be an argument here; so suppose you give your summary of events from the lady’s standpoint, as that seems to be the one which interests you most.”
“I was about to do so,” Horace assured him, heedless of the rough fellow’s good-natured taunt. “To make my point, it is absolutely necessary for us to transfer ourselves into her position and view matters as they gradually unfolded themselves before her eyes. First, then, as I have before suggested, let us consider the interview held by this man and woman in the woods. Miss Dare, as we must remember, was not engaged to Mr. Mansell; she only loved him. Their engagement, to say nothing of their marriage, depended upon his success in life—a success which to them seemed to hang solely upon the decision of Mrs. Clemmens concerning the small capital he desired her to advance him. But in the interview which Mansell had held with his aunt previous to the meeting between the lovers, Mrs. Clemmens had refused to loan him this money, and Miss Dare, whose feelings we are endeavoring to follow, found herself beset by the entreaties of a man who, having failed in his plans for future fortune, feared the loss of her love as well. What was the natural consequence? Rebellion against the widow’s decision, of course—a rebellion which she showed by the violent gesture which she made;—and then a determination to struggle for her happiness, as she evinced when, with most unhappy ambiguity of expression, she begged him to wait till the next day before pressing his ring upon her acceptance, because, as she said:
“ ‘A night has been known to change the whole current of a person’s affairs.’
“To her, engrossed with the one idea of making a personal effort to alter Mrs. Clemmens’ mind on the money question, these words seemed innocent enough. But the look with which he received them, and the pause that followed, undoubtedly impressed her, and prepared the way for the interest she manifested when, upon looking through the telescope the next day, she saw him flying in that extraordinary way from his aunt’s cottage toward the woods. Not that she then thought of his having committed a crime. As I trace her mental experience, she did not come to that conclusion till it was forced upon her. I do not know, and so cannot say, how she first heard of the murder—”
“She was told of it on the street-corner,” interpolated Mr. Ferris.
“Ah, well, then, fresh from this vision of her lover hasting from his aunt’s door to hide himself in the woods beyond, she came into town and was greeted by the announcement that Mrs. Clemmens had just been assaulted by a tramp in her own house. I know this was the way in which the news was told her, from the expression of her face as she entered the house. I was standing at the gate, you remember, when she came up, and her look had in it determination and horror, but no special fear. In fact, the words she dropped show the character of her thoughts at that time. She distinctly murmured in my hearing: ‘No good can come of it, none.’ As if her mind were dwelling upon the advantages which might accrue to her lover from his aunt’s death, and weighing them against the foul means by which that person’s end had been hastened. Yet I will not say but she may have been influenced in the course which she took by some doubt or apprehension of her own. The fact that she came to the house at all, and, having come, insisted upon knowing all the details of the assault, seem to prove she was not without a desire to satisfy herself that suspicion rightfully attached itself to the tramp. But not until she saw her lover’s ring on the floor (the ring which she had with her own hand dropped into the pocket of his coat the day before) and heard that the tramp had justified himself and was no longer considered the assailant, did her true fear and horror come. Then, indeed, all the past rose up before her, and, believing her lover guilty of this crime, she laid claim to the jewel as the first and only alternative that offered by which she might stand between him and the consequences of his guilt. Her subsequent agitation when the dying woman made use of the exclamation that indissolubly connected the crime with a ring, speaks for itself. Nor was her departure from the house any too hurried or involuntary, when you consider that the vengeance invoked by the widow, was, in Miss Dare’s opinion, called down upon one to whom she had nearly plighted her troth. What is the next act
