At last he remarked, still staring at her as though hypnotized: “It is a most remarkable case! Miss Legaye, if you feel the loss of this man so deeply—and I am convinced that you do, in spite of the paradox it presents—why, if you don’t mind, did you shoot him?” She flashed him a scornful glance. “Shoot him!” she repeated vehemently. “You surely don’t suppose for one moment that I meant to shoot him?” “But——” the inspector was beginning. “Shoot _him_!” she rushed on, with a different emphasis. “Of course I didn’t! It is the sorrow of my life that it turned out in that horrible manner. No; it was that Merivale woman whom I meant to shoot! He was making love to her, and I couldn’t stand it! I aimed at her, but—but—I suppose he was closer to her than I thought, and—it happened!” She bit her lips and clenched her small hands. They could all see that it was only with the greatest difficulty and by the most tremendous effort that she was able to control the frenzy of her rage and despair over that fatal mischance. “At that, I hadn’t planned to kill even her,” she went on, after a moment or two. “Not then, at any rate. But when the opportunity came, sent straight from heaven as it seemed,” said this astounding, moralless woman most earnestly, “I simply could not help it.” “Suppose you tell us what actually happened.” “Why not, now? What I told him”—she looked at Jim Barrison—“was all quite true up to the point where I stopped at Alan’s door and heard my sister’s voice. The rest, of course, was different. What I really did then was to wait, listening to the struggle and quarrel inside until I could make out that my—my father was succeeding in separating them. The door opened and Marita almost staggered out, with her waist all torn and her hair half down. She looked dreadful, and I was so afraid some one would see her. “At the same second I saw the pistol lying just inside the door. Alan said: ‘Shut that door!’ Neither he nor my father had seen me. I bent down quickly and, reaching in, picked up the pistol. The next second my father had shut the door very quietly and quickly, for no lights were to be shown in the theater. “I still had no real intention of using the thing that night. I just picked it up, acting on an impulse. Besides, I didn’t think that my sister was in any state to handle it then; so I kept it, and did not give it to her. Then I pulled off my evening coat and made Marita put it on.” “One moment, with Inspector Lowry’s permission,” Barrison interrupted. “All that must have taken time, Miss Legaye, and there were people all around you. I myself was only a short distance away.” “You were standing up stage,” she informed him tranquilly, “and the stairway going to the second tier of dressing rooms masked Alan’s door from where you were. As for the time, it took scarcely a minute; it happened like lightning. Such things take time to tell about, but not to do.”