It was when I got home from the inquest that I found old Isaac’s basket waiting.  I am not a crying woman, but I could hardly see my mother’s picture for tears.—­Well, after all, that is not the Brice story.  I am not writing the sordid tragedy of my life.

That was on Tuesday.  Jennie Brice had been missing nine days.  In all that time, although she was cast for the piece at the theater that week, no one there had heard from her.  Her relatives had had no word.  She had gone away, if she had gone, on a cold March night, in a striped black and white dress with a red collar, and a red and black hat, without her fur coat, which she had worn all winter.  She had gone very early in the morning, or during the night.  How had she gone?  Mr. Ladley said he had rowed her to Federal Street at half after six and had brought the boat back.  After they had quarreled violently all night, and when she was leaving him, wouldn’t he have allowed her to take herself away?  Besides, the police had found no trace of her on an early train.  And then at daylight, between five and six, my own brother had seen a woman with Mr. Howell, a woman who might have been Jennie Brice.  But if it was, why did not Mr. Howell say so?

Mr. Ladley claimed she was hiding, in revenge.  But Jennie Brice was not that sort of woman; there was something big about her, something that is found often in large women—­a lack of spite.  She was not petty or malicious.  Her faults, like her virtues, were for all to see.

In spite of the failure to identify the body, Mr. Ladley was arrested that night, Tuesday, and this time it was for murder.  I know now that the police were taking long chances.  They had no strong motive for the crime.  As Mr. Holcombe said, they had provocation, but not motive, which is different.  They had opportunity, and they had a lot of straggling links of clues, which in the total made a fair chain of circumstantial evidence.  But that was all.

That is the way the case stood on Tuesday night, March the thirteenth.

Mr. Ladley was taken away at nine o’clock.  He was perfectly cool, asked me to help him pack a suit case, and whistled while it was being done.  He requested to be allowed to walk to the jail, and went quietly, with a detective on one side and I think a sheriff’s officer on the other.

Just before he left, he asked for a word or two with me, and when he paid his bill up to date, and gave me an extra dollar for taking care of Peter, I was almost overcome.  He took the manuscript of his play with him, and I remember his asking if he could have any typing done in the jail.  I had never seen a man arrested for murder before, but I think he was probably the coolest suspect the officers had ever seen.  They hardly knew what to make of it.

Mr. Reynolds and I had a cup of tea after all the excitement, and were sitting at the dining-room table drinking it, when the bell rang.  It was Mr. Howell!  He half staggered into the hall when I opened the door, and was for going into the parlor bedroom without a word.