When Mr. Reddy was called a sort of stir went over the people. Everybody was curious to hear his story, as we’d only got bits of it, most of them wild rumors. And there wasn’t a soul in Longwood that didn’t grieve for him, plunged down at the moment when he thought he was most happy into such an awful tragedy. As he sat down in the chair opposite the Coroner, the room was as still as a tomb, even the reporters behind me not making so much as the scratch of a pen. He looked gray and pinched, his eyes burnt out like a person’s who hasn’t slept for nights. You could see he was nervous, for he kept crossing and uncrossing his knees, and he didn’t give his evidence nearly so clear and continued as the newspapers had it. He’d stop every now and then as if he didn’t remember or as if he was thinking of the best way to express himself. He began by telling how he and Sylvia had arranged to go in his car to Bloomington, and there be married by his friend Fiske, an Episcopal clergyman. The Coroner asked him if Fiske expected them and he said no, he hadn’t had time to let him know as the elopement was decided on hurriedly. "Why was the decision hurried?" the Coroner asked and he answered low, as if he was reluctant to say it. "Because Miss Hesketh had a violent quarrel with her stepfather on Saturday morning. It was not till after that that she made up her mind she would go with me." "Did you know at the time what that quarrel was about?" His face got a dull red and he said low. "Yes, she told me of it in a letter she wrote me immediately afterward." Then he told how on Saturday night he had received a special delivery letter from her, telling of the quarrel and agreeing to the elopement. That letter he had destroyed. He answered it the next morning, she having directed him to bring it in himself and deliver it to Virginie, who would meet him opposite Corwin’s drugstore. This he did, the letter being the one already in evidence. The Coroner asked him to explain the sentence which said "Don’t disappoint me—don’t do what you did the other time." He looked straight in front of him and answered: "We had made a plan to elope once before and she had backed out." "Do you know why?" "It was too—too unusual—too unconventional. When it came to the scandal of an elopement she hung back." "Is it your opinion that the quarrel with Dr. Fowler made her agree the second time?" "I know nothing about that." Then he told of leaving Firehill, coming into Longwood, and going down Maple Lane. "I reached there a few minutes before seven and ran down to the pine tree where I was to meet her. I drew up to one side of the road and waited. During the time I waited—half an hour—I neither saw nor heard anybody. At half-past seven I decided she had changed her mind again and left." "You didn’t go to the house?" "No—I was not welcome at the house. She had told me not to go there." "You were in the habit of seeing her somewhere else, though?"