The curtain went up on the first act of the play. It was not perhaps so interesting from the outset as the audience would have wished, and the fashionable portion thereof showed its impatience by sundry coughings and whisperings, which had to be peremptorily checked now and again by a loud: "Silence, there!" and a threat to clear the court. The medical officer was giving his testimony at great length as to the cause of death. Technical terms were used in plenty, and puzzled the elegant ladies who had come here to be amused. The jury listened attentively, and the coroner--himself a medical man--asked several very pertinent questions: "The thrust," he asked of Doctor Blair, who was medical officer of the district, "through the neck was effected by means of a long narrow instrument, with two sharp edges, a dagger in fact?" "A dagger or a stiletto or a skewer," replied the doctor. "Any sharp, two-edged instrument would cause a wound like the one in the neck of the deceased." "Was death instantaneous?" "Almost so." He explained at some length the intricacies of the human throat at the points where the murderer's weapon had entered the neck of his victim. Louisa listened attentively. Every moment she expected to see the coroner's hand wandering to the piece of green baize in front of him, and then drawing it away disclosing a snake-wood stick with silver ferrule stained, and showing the rise of the dagger, sheathed within the body of the stick. Every moment she expected to hear the query: "Is this the instrument which dealt the blow?" But this apparently was not to be just yet. The opaque veil of green baize was not to be lifted; that certain long Something was not to be revealed, the Something that would condemn Luke irrevocably, absolutely, to disgrace and to death. Only one of the members of the jury--Louisa understood that he was the foreman--asked a simple question: "Would," he said, "the witness explain whether in his opinion the--the unknown murderer--the--I mean----" He floundered a little in the phrase, having realized that in his official capacity he must keep an open mind--and in that open mind of an English juryman there could for the present dwell no certainty that a murderer--an unknown murderer--did exist. They were all here--he and the others and the coroner--in order to find out if there had been a murder committed or not. The coroner, one elbow on the table, one large hand holding firmly the somewhat fleshy chin, looked at the juryman somewhat contemptuously. "You mean?" he queried with an obvious effort at patience. "I mean," resumed the man more firmly, "in this present instance, would a certain medical or anatomical knowledge be necessary in order to strike--er--or to thrust--so precisely--just on the right spot to cause immediate death?" With amiable condescension the coroner put the query to the witness in more concise words.