“’This called from him the direct inquiry, “Did you see anyone over there at the moment this young girl fell?”

“’She shook her head.  Afterward she explained the denial by saying that she had been looking down into the court.

“’But he did not cease his inquiries.  Turning to the people crowding about him, he put the like question to them; but receiving no answer, a silence followed, during which a woman suggested in tones loud enough for all to hear, that there were no arrows on the other side of the court, but that the gallery where they stood was full of them.

“’This seemed to alarm Mrs. Taylor.  Turning to the director, she asked whether he was sure that the opposite gallery held no arrows and no bows; and when he replied that nothing of the kind was to be found along its entire length, she proceeded to inquire whether any such deed could be committed in a place so open to view, without attracting the observation of some one wandering in court or gallery.

“’This, undoubtedly, to ascertain the full extent of his danger, before bestowing a thought upon herself.  But at his answer, given with the cold precision of a thoroughly selfish man, that if anyone in the whole building had seen so much as a movement in a spot so under suspicion, that person would have been heard from by this time, she faltered and was heard to ask what he had in mind and why the people about her looked at her so.  He did not respond directly, but made some remark about the police, which increased her alarm to the point of an attempted justification.  She said that it was true about the arrows, as anyone could see by looking up at the walls.  But where was the bow?  No one could shoot an arrow without a bow, and when some one shouted that if an arrow was used as a dagger, one wouldn’t need a bow, a sort of frenzy seized her and she acted quite insane, falling at the young girl’s side and whispering sentence after sentence in her ear.

“’What more was needed to stamp her as a mad woman in the eyes of the ordinary observer?  Nothing.  But to you and me, with the cue just given, it has another look.  She had just seen the man whom she had herself spared from an accusation which would have been his ruin accept in the coldest fashion an explanation which left her own innocence in doubt.  What wonder she succumbed to temporary aberration!  As will be remembered, she soon became comparatively calm again, and so remained until in an interview I had with her a half hour or so later I urged her, possibly with too much insistence, for some explanation of the extreme agitation she had shown at the time, when she broke forth with the remarkable statement that it was not the child, but her husband, she was mourning, stricken to death, as she would have us believe, simultaneously with the young and innocent victim then lying dead at her feet.