"You must pardon me; I spoke falsely to you just now," she says, with desperate calmness. "I can tell you how those stains came there. They are Vernon Clyde's blood." Again an ominous whisper runs through the circle of listeners. Maud glances around her fearfully. She meets strange, averted glances from faces that have been wont to smile upon her before. A strange light comes into her eyes. "Oh, what do they mean?" she cries. "They do not think, do they, that I killed Mr. Clyde? I tell you he killed himself. He told me he would do so if I refused to marry him." "Tell us how those blood-stains came upon your dress," the coroner answers, briefly and gravely. She clasps her hands and shivers through all her imperially perfect form. "I _did_ come back here last night," she says, in a fearful whisper. "My uncle had discarded me. Mr. Charteris had married another, and I had no one to turn to but the lover I had discarded a little while before. So I hurried back, thinking I would be Clyde's wife after all, but when I came, he," with a gasp, "he lay dead before me. I had thought it but a mere idle threat to frighten me, but he had kept his word faithfully. He had shot himself through the heart. I knelt down beside him, and laid my hand on his breast, but it was cold and still. Oh, you must not think I killed him! I loved him, and I would have gone away with him, but I was afraid of losing my uncle's money," she ends, with a choking sob. "Why did you not raise an alarm when you found him dead?" "I was afraid they would charge me with his murder, so I hurried away, not knowing of those tell-tale stains on my dress where I had been down on my knees beside him. I did not kill him, no, no, but my fatal weakness drove him to take his own life." There is a moment's perfect silence, then the voice of the coroner is heard, with a troubled cadence in its sternness: "I regret my painful duty, Miss Langton, more than I can say. The high position you have always held in this county would forbid the thought of your criminality, but the evidence against you is of such a nature that we shall be compelled to commit you to prison until further developments." Her cry of terror and indignation echoes to the blue sky above her golden head. The sweet song-birds fly affrighted from its shrill, eerie sound. "You believe me guilty," she exclaimed. "Yet I have told you again and again that Vernon Clyde died by his own hand." "If you could prove it to us," he says, "if you could even prove by a competent witness his threat of self murder, you should go free this hour." She looks at him dumbly and strangely. Suddenly a light of dazzling joy breaks over her face. She slips her gloved hand into the folds of her dress, withdrawing it with a gasp of disappointment.