This might have been a true statement, but I think no one in the room believed it.  The coroner tried again.

“Try to think, Mrs. Pierce.  It is important that we should know if Miss Lloyd was wearing a yellow rose.”

“Yes,” flared out Mrs. Pierce angrily, “so that you can prove she went down to her uncle’s office later and dropped a piece of her rose there!  But I tell you I don’t remember whether she was wearing a rose or not, and it wouldn’t matter if she had on forty roses!  If Florence Lloyd says she didn’t go down-stairs, she didn’t.”

“I think we all believe in Miss Lloyd’s veracity,” said Mr. Monroe, “but it is necessary to discover where those rose petals in the library came from.  You saw the flowers in her room, Mrs. Pierce?”

“Yes, I believe I did.  But I paid no attention to them, as Florence nearly always has flowers in her room.”

“Would you have heard Miss Lloyd if she had gone down-stairs after you left her?”

“I don’t know,” said Mrs. Pierce, doubtfully.

“Is your room next to hers?”

“No, not next.”

“Is it on the same corridor?”

“No.”

“Around a corner?”

“Yes.”

“And at some distance?”

“Yes.”  Mrs. Pierce’s answers became more hesitating as she saw the drift of Mr. Monroe’s questions.  Clearly, she was trying to shield Florence, if necessary, at the expense of actual truthfulness.

“Then,” went on Mr. Monroe, inexorably, “I understand you to say that you think you would have heard Miss Lloyd, had she gone down-stairs, although your room is at a distance and around a corner and the hall and stairs are thickly carpeted.  Unless you were listening especially, Mrs. Pierce, I think you would scarcely have heard her descend.”

“Well, as she didn’t go down, of course I didn’t hear her,” snapped Mrs. Pierce, with the feminine way of settling an argument by an unprovable statement.

Mr. Monroe began on another tack.

“When you went to Miss Lloyd’s room,” he said, “was the maid, Elsa, there?”

“Miss Lloyd had just dismissed her for the night.”

“What was Miss Lloyd doing when you went to her room?”

“She was looking over some gowns that she proposed sending to the cleaner’s.”

The coroner fairly jumped.  He remembered the newspaper clipping of a cleaner’s advertisement, which was even now in the gold bag before him.  Though all the jurors had seen it, it had not been referred to in the presence of the women.

Recovering himself at once, he said quietly “Was not that rather work for Miss Lloyd’s maid?”

“Oh, Elsa would pack and send them, of course,” said Mrs. Pierce carelessly.  “Miss Lloyd was merely deciding which ones needed cleaning.”

“Do you know where they were to be sent?”

Mrs. Pierce looked a little surprised at this question.