“Yes. Well, I daresay your mother will take you away as soon as you’ve answered a few questions,” said the woman indifferently and quietly. “They want you downstairs first for a few minutes now.” “Is Mother there?” “She’s in the waiting-room. You’ll be able to see her afterwards.” “_Afterwards?_” Elsie’s agonised perceptions fastened upon that one word. She sought with frantic and irrational intensity to pierce the veiled threat that she felt it to convey. A man whom she knew to be a police-inspector appeared at an open door, and the uniformed woman went away. “Now, Mrs. Williams, I’m afraid we must trouble you for a short statement,” said the man pleasantly. “Will you follow me, if you please?” He moved forward, and Elsie saw into the room that he had just left. Leslie Morrison was within it. As their eyes met, it seemed to Elsie that the last shreds of self-control deserted her, and she screamed on a high and hideous note words that came incoherently and frenziedly from some power outside herself. “Leslie, Leslie! Oh, God, what shall I do? Why did you do it? I didn’t ever mean you to do it.... I must tell the truth....” The inspector swung sharply round and gripped her by the arm. “Do you realise what you’re saying? It is my duty to caution you that anything you say now may be used in evidence against you.” Elsie burst into hysterical sobs and tears. The man pushed her gently into another room where another official and a young man in plain clothes sat at a table with papers and pens in front of them. The interrogatory that followed was conducted with grave suavity by the senior official, but Elsie was conscious only of a horror of committing herself. She said again and again that she and her husband had always been happy together. It was a faint relief when at last they came to actual questions of fact, and she could reply with direct statements to the enquiries as to her movements on the previous evening. (O God, was it only last night that she and Horace had gone to the theatre--only _this morning_ that they had started to walk home from the Tube station?) “Mrs. Williams, I want you to tell me in your own words exactly what happened in the alleyway just before your husband was struck.” Elsie realised with despair that she must say something. She was not imaginative, but almost without her own knowledge she had evolved a sort of account by which, it seemed to her, confusedly, that she might safeguard herself. “We were walking along,” she said in a trembling, almost inaudible voice, “and there wasn’t anybody in sight, and suddenly someone rushed up from behind and pushed me away from my husband. I was sort of dazed for a moment--I think I must have been pushed against the wall--and when I recovered I saw Horace--my husband--struggling with a man. Then the man ran away.” “Did you see the man’s face?” “No,” said Elsie, with ashen lips. “But you know who it was?” “It was Leslie Morrison.”