They had many things to discuss. First, their own case now drawing to a successful close; next, the murder of the day before; and lastly, the few facts which had been elicited in regard to that murder, in the inquiry which had that day been begun before the coroner. Of the latter Mr. Ferris spoke with much interest. He had attended the inquest himself, and, though he had not much to communicate--the time having been mainly taken up in selecting and swearing in a jury--a few witnesses had been examined and certain conclusions reached, which certainly added greatly to the impression already made upon the public mind, that an affair of great importance had arisen; an affair, too, promising more in the way of mystery than the simple nature of its earlier manifestations gave them reason to suppose. In the first place, the widow had evidently been assaulted with a deliberate purpose and a serious intent to slay. Secondly, no immediate testimony was forthcoming calculated to point with unerring certainty to the guilty party. To be sure, the tramp and the hunchback still offered possibilities of suspicion; but even they were slight, the former having been seen to leave the widow's house without entering, and the latter having been proved beyond a question to have come into town on the morning train and to have gone at once to court where he remained till the time they all saw him disappear down the street. That the last-mentioned individual may have had some guilty knowledge of the crime was possible enough. The fact of his having wiped himself out so completely as to elude all search, was suspicious in itself, but if he was connected with the assault it must have been simply as an accomplice employed to distract public attention from the real criminal; and in a case like this, the interest naturally centres with the actual perpetrator; and the question was now and must be: Who was the man who, in broad daylight, dared to enter a house situated like this in a thickly populated street, and kill with a blow an inoffensive woman? "I cannot imagine," declared Mr. Ferris, as his communication reached this point. "It looks as if she had an enemy, but what enemy could such a person as she possess--a woman who always did her own work, attended to her own affairs, and made it an especial rule of her life never to meddle with those of anybody else?" "Was she such a woman?" inquired Mr. Byrd, to whom as yet no knowledge had come of the widow's life, habits, or character.