"But don't imagine that I'm under any delusion about you; you'll know better by the time I've done. You're the kind of man who's not to be trusted with a girl. You make love to every woman you meet--what you call love! You're entangled with no end of women. I know! I don't know how many think you're going to marry them, but I shouldn't be surprised if Miss Patterson and Miss Austin both think you are. If I were to go and tell them, do you think they'd marry you? Not they; they're not that sort." "But you won't tell them. You're not that sort either. I, perhaps, know you better than you know yourself." "It's this way. Even you mayn't know who you're going to marry, but I do. You're going to marry me." "I wish I were. I'll admit so much. But--we can't always do what we wish, my dear." "You can, and do; that's what makes you dangerous--at first to others, in the end to yourself. Rodney, I don't want to say something which will change the whole face of the world for both of us, but I'll have to if you make me. Don't you make me! Say you'll marry me." "My dear child----" "Don't talk like that to me; don't you do it! You're duller than I thought, or long before this you'd have seen what I was driving at. Now, you listen to me; I'll tell you. To-day I was at the inquest." "That fact, I assure you, in spite of my dullness, I have appreciated already. What I still fail to understand is what the attraction was." "Attraction! You call it an attraction! You wait. I've always thought that an inquest was to find out the truth, not to hide it up. The idea of that one seemed to be to conceal, not to reveal. The coroner was an old idiot, as blind as a bat. He'd got a notion into his head, and as there wasn't room for more than one at a time--why, there it was! I went there knowing nothing, guessing nothing, suspecting nothing. The inquest hadn't hardly begun before I saw everything, knew everything, understood everything. But the coroner, the jury, and the witnesses--they knew less at the end than the beginning." "Your words suggest that nature erred in making you a pretty girl, and therefore incompetent to be a coroner." "According to the guard of the train, your uncle was found sitting up in a corner of the carriage, with a box in his hand, in which were some of the things with which he is supposed to have poisoned himself. The box was handed round for the coroner and jury to look at. Directly I saw it I knew it." If Elmore changed countenance it was only very slightly, and the change went as quickly as it came; yet one felt that for an instant it had been there. "Is that so? What sort of box was it? It must have been something rather out of the common run of boxes for you to have recognised it at what, I take it, was some little distance."