“About what time was this?”

“The time—­it was half-past ten, for that was the time I was to be there according to the letter the judge sent me.”

“But are you sure it was half-past ten?  Weren’t you early?  Wasn’t it just about ten o’clock?”

“No, monsieur,” she replied sadly.  “If it had been ten o’clock I would have been in time to save the life of my lover—­to prevent this great tragedy which brings grief to so many.”

Crewe looked at her sharply, and then nodded his head in acquiescence of the fact that much misery would have been averted if she had been in time to save the life of Sir Horace Fewbanks.

“When you went into the room, Sir Horace Fewbanks, you say, was lying on the floor, dying.  Whereabouts in the room was he?”

“If he had been in this room he would have been lying just behind you, with his head to the wall and his feet pointing towards that window.  He struggled and groaned after I went in, and altered his position a little, but not much.  He died so.”

Crewe rapidly reviewed his recollection of the room in which the judge had been killed.  Once again Gabrielle’s statement tallied with his own reconstruction of the crime and the manner of its perpetration.  If the murder had been committed in his office the second bullet would have gone through the window instead of imbedding itself in the wall, and the judge would have fallen in the spot where she indicated.

“And where was the writing-desk from where you got your letters?” was Crewe’s next question.

“It was over there—­almost by that—­your little bookcase there.”

She pointed to a small oaken bookstand which stood slightly in advance of the more imposing shelves in which reposed the portentous volumes of newspaper clippings and photographs which constituted Crewe’s “Rogues’ Library.”

“Now we come to the letters.  You took them from the secret drawer in the desk.  Why did you remove them?”

“Because I would not have the police agents find them, for then they would want to know so much.”

“And what did you do with them?”

“Monsieur Crewe, I destroyed them.  When I got home I burnt them all—­I was so frightened.”

“You mean you were frightened to keep them in your possession after the judge was killed?”

“Yes.  What place had I to keep them safe from prying eyes?  So, monsieur, I burnt them all—­one by one—­and the charred fragments I kept and took into the Park next day, where I scattered them unobserved.”

“And what became of the letter you wrote to Sir Horace Fewbanks at Craigleith Hall, asking him to come to London and save you from your husband’s persecutions?”

She looked at him earnestly in the endeavour to ascertain if he had laid a trap for her.

“Sir Horace destroyed it in Scotland, I suppose, if the police did not find it.”

“Strange that he should have kept all your other letters so carefully and destroyed that one.  Perhaps it was in his pocket-book that was stolen.”