"Yes. My name is Madeline Whitmarsh. At home everyone looks at me as if I was an object of mingled pity and reproach. I thought that they might know the name here, so I gave the first that came into my head. I think it is a street I was directed along. Besides, I don't want it to be known that I came to see you in any case." "Why?" Much of the girl's conscious nervousness had stiffened into an attitude of unconscious hardness. Grief takes many forms, and whatever she had been before, the tragic episode had left Miss Whitmarsh a little hurt and cynical. "You are a man living in a town and can do as you like. I am a girl living in the country and have therefore to do largely as my neighbours like. For me to set up my opinion against popular feeling would constitute no small offence; to question its justice would be held to be adding outrageous insult to enormous injury." "So far I am unable to go beyond the newspaper account. On the face of it, your father--with what provocation of course I do not know--did attempt this Mr Frank Whitmarsh's life and then take his own. You imply another version. What reason have you?" "That is the terrible part of it," exclaimed the girl, with rising distress. "It was that which made me so afraid of coming to you, although I felt that I must, for I dreaded that when you asked me for proofs and I could give you none you would refuse to help me. We were not even in time to hear him speak, and yet I know, _know_ with absolute conviction, that my father would not have done this. There are things that you cannot explain, Mr Carrados, and--well, there is an end of it." Her voice sank to an absent-minded whisper. "Everyone will condemn him now that he cannot defend himself, and yet he could not even have had the revolver that was found at his feet." "What is that?" demanded Carrados sharply. "Do you mean that?" "Mean what?" she asked, with the blankness of one who has lost the thread of her own thoughts. "What you said about the revolver--that your father could not have had it?" "The revolver?" she repeated half wearily; "oh yes. It was a heavy, old-fashioned affair. It had been lying in a drawer of his desk for more than ten years because once a dog came into the orchard in broad daylight light and worried half-a-dozen lambs before anyone could do anything." "Yes, but why could he not have it on Thursday?" "I noticed that it was gone. After Frank had left in the afternoon I went into the room where he had been waiting, to finish dusting. The paper says the dining-room, but it was really papa's business-room and no one else used it. Then when I was dusting the desk I saw that the revolver was no longer there." "You had occasion to open the drawer?" "It is really a very old bureau and none of the drawers fit closely. Dust lies on the ledges and you always have to open them a little to dust properly. They were never kept locked." "Possibly your father had taken the revolver with him."