"Only the family group; Mr. and Mrs. Stannard, Mr. Barry Stannard, Miss Vernon and myself." "Once again, Mrs. Faulkner, you attach no significance to the words, 'Natalie, not Joyce,' which Blake quotes Mr. Stannard as saying?" Taken thus unexpectedly, Mrs. Faulkner hesitated. Then she said, steadily: "I do not. They were the articulation of a brain already clouded by approaching death. He merely named the people he saw nearest to him." "That is not true! Eric meant what he said!" It was Joyce Stannard who spoke. III What They Said With a vague idea of taking advantage of a psychological moment, Coroner Lamson began to question Joyce. "Why do you make that statement, Mrs. Stannard?" he said; "do you realise that it is a grave implication?" But Joyce, though not hysterical, was at high tension, and she said, talking rapidly, "My husband's words were in direct answer to the footman's question. Blake said, 'Who did this?' and Mr. Stannard, even pointing to Miss Vernon, said, 'Natalie, not Joyce.' Could anything be plainer?" "It might seem so, yet we must take into consideration the fast clouding intellect of the dying man, and endeavour thus to get at the truth. Will you tell the circumstances of your entering the room, Mrs. Stannard?" "Of course I will. I had been in the Billiard Room for some time, ever since dinner, in fact----" "Alone?" "Not at first. Several were there with me. Then, later, all had gone--and--I was there alone." The speaker paused. She seemed to forget her audience and became lost in recollection or in thought. She looked very beautiful, as she sat, robed in her black gown of soft, thin material, with a bit of white turned in at the throat. Her brown hair waved carelessly back to a loose, low knot and her deep-set brown eyes, full of sorrow, grew suddenly luminous. "Perhaps it wasn't Natalie," she said, speaking breathlessly. "Perhaps it wasn't Miss Vernon--after all." "We are not asking your opinion, Mrs. Stannard," said the Coroner, stiffly; "kindly confine your recital to the facts as they happened." But now, the witness' poise was shaken. Of a temperamental nature, Joyce Stannard had thought of something or realised something that affected the trend of her testimony. Bobsy Roberts watched her with intense interest. "Well, Milady," he said to her, mentally, "you've struck a snag in your well-planned defence. Careful now, don't leap before you look!" "Yes," said Joyce, but her quivering lip precluded further speech. The Coroner was made decidedly uncomfortable by the sight of her beauty and her distress, always a disquieting combination, and to hide his sympathy, he repeated, brusquely, "The facts, please, as they occurred." "I was in the Billiard Room," Joyce began again, "and I heard, in the studio, a slight sound of some sort, and then the light in here went out." "Which was first, the sound or the sudden darkness?"