"May I ask you a few questions?" "Sure." "Had Mrs. Hunt's body been moved when you arrived? I mean, from the very spot where it fell?" "It had and it hadn't. The doc here found her lyin' face down on the floor, right in front of the couch. He had to roll her over on her back to examine her. That's all. The body's there now like that, covered with a sheet. Nothin' else has been disturbed." "The body was lying face down, you say?" "Yes," struck in Doctor Askew; "it was." "At full length?" "Yes." "Isn't that rather surprising?" "Unquestionably." "How do you account for the position?" "There's only one possible explanation," replied Doctor Askew, as if giving expert testimony from a witness box; "a sudden and complete loss of balance, pitching the body sharply forward, accompanied by such a binding of the legs and feet as to prevent any instinctive movement toward recovery." "Thank you. Were there any indications of such binding?" "Yes. Mrs. Hunt's trailing draperies had somehow wound themselves tightly about her legs below the knee, and I judge her feet were further impeded by a sort of coverlet which I found touselled up on the rug beneath them." "Grant all that!" growled Maltby. "It points to just the opposite of what we'd all like to think is true. If Mrs. Hunt had risen slowly to greet a caller in the usual way--well, she wouldn't have gotten herself tangled up. She was the last woman in the world to do anything awkwardly. But if she leaped to her feet in terror--what? To defend herself--or try to escape? Don't you see?" "Of course we see!" cried Lucette. "It proves everything!" "Hardly," I replied. "Try to imagine the scene, Maltby, as you seem to believe it occurred. I won't speak of the major impossibility--that Susan, a girl you've known and have asked to be your wife, could under any circumstances be the author of such a crime! We'll pass that. Simply try to picture the crime itself. Susan, showing no traces of unnatural excitement, is conducted to my wife's boudoir. She enters, shuts the door, turns, then rushes at her with so hideous an effect of insane fury that Gertrude springs up, terrified. Susan--more slightly built than Gertrude, remember!--grapples with her, tears a paper knife from her hand, and plunges it deep into her eye, penetrating the brain. Suppose, if you will, that madness lent her this force. But, obviously, for the point of the knife to enter the eye in that way, Gertrude must have been fronting Susan, her chin well raised. Obviously, the force of such a blow would have thrown her head, her whole body, backward, not forward; and if her feet were bound, as Doctor Askew says they were, she must have fallen backward or to one side, certainly not forward at full length, on her face." "You've said somethin' this time, Mr. Hunt!" exclaimed Conlon. "There's a lot to that!"