“Three years.”

“What were your relations with him?”

The coroner interposed.  “You need answer no questions tending to incriminate you, Mr. Lane.”

A sardonic smile rested on the rough rider’s lean, brown face.  “Our relations were not friendly,” he said quietly.

A ripple of excitement swept the benches.

“What was the cause of the bad feeling between you?”

“A few years ago my father fell into financial difficulties.  He was faced with bankruptcy.  Cunningham not only refused to help him, but was the hardest of his creditors.  He hounded him to the time of my father’s death a few months later.  His death was due to a breakdown caused by intense worry.”

“You felt that Mr. Cunningham ought to have helped him?”

“My father helped him when he was young.  What my uncle did was the grossest ingratitude.”

“You resented it.”

“Yes.”

“And quarreled with him?”

“I wrote him a letter an’ told him what I thought of him.  Later, when we met by chance, I told him again face to face.”

“You had a bitter quarrel?”

“Yes.”

“That was how long ago?”

“Three years since.”

“In that time did your feelings toward him modify at all?”

“My opinion of him did not change, but I had no longer any feelin’ in the matter.”

“Did you write to him or hear from him in that time?”

“No.”

“Had you any expectation of being remembered in your uncle’s will?”

“None whatever,” answered Kirby, smiling.  “Even if he had left me anything I should have declined to accept it.  But there was no chance at all that he would.”

“Yet when you came to town you called on him at the first opportunity?”

“Yes.”

“On what business?”

“I reckon we’ll not go into that.”

Johns glanced at his notes and passed to another line of questioning. 
“You have heard the testimony of Mr. and Mrs. Hull and of Mr. Ellis. 
Is that testimony true?”

“Except in one point.  It lacked only three or four minutes to ten when I knocked at the door an’ Mrs. Hull opened it.”

“You’re sure of that?”

“Sure.  I looked at my watch just before I went into the Paradox Apartments.”

“Will you tell the jury what took place between you and Mrs. Hull?”

“‘Soon as I saw her I knew she was scared stiff about somethin’.  So was Hull.  He was headin’ for a bedroom, so I wouldn’t see him.”

The slender, well-dressed woman in the black veil, sitting far over to the left, leaned forward and seemed to listen intently.  All over the room there was a stir of quickened interest.

“How did she show her fear?”

“No color in her face, eyes dilated an’ full of terror, hands tremblin’.”

“And Mr. Hull?”

“He was yellow.  Color all gone from his face.  Looked as though he’d had a shock.”