"After this young Tufnell was called. He was a shy-looking fellow, with a nervous manner altogether out of keeping with his dark expressive eyes--eyes which he had obviously inherited from his mother and which gave him a foreign as well as a romantic appearance. He was said to be musical and to be a talented amateur actor. Every one agreed, it seems, that he had always been a very good son to his mother until his love for Ann Weber had absorbed all his thoughts and most of his screw. He explained that he was junior clerk to Mr. Jessup, and as far as he knew had always given satisfaction. On the sixteenth he had also noticed that the guv'nor was not quite himself. He appeared unusually curt and irritable with everybody. Witness had not been in the house all the evening. When his mother told him that neither she nor Ann could go to the cinema with him he went off by himself, and after the show he went straight back to his digs near the Alexandra Palace. He only heard of the tragedy when he arrived at the office as usual on the morning of the seventeenth. His evidence would have seemed uninteresting and unimportant but for the fact that while he gave it he glanced now and again in the direction where Ann Weber sat beside her aunt. It seemed as if he were all the time mutely asking for her approval of what he was saying, and presently when the coroner asked him whether he knew the cause of his employer's irritability, he very obviously looked at Ann before he finally said: 'No, sir, I don't!' "After that Ann Weber was called. Of course it had been clear all along that she was by far the most important witness in this mysterious case, and when she rose from her place, looking very trim and neat in her navy-blue coat and skirt, with a jaunty little hat pulled over her left eye, and wearing long amber earrings that gave her pretty face a piquant expression, every one settled down comfortably to enjoy the sensation of the afternoon. "Ann, who was thoroughly self-possessed, answered the coroner's preliminary questions quite glibly, and when she was asked to relate what occurred at No. 13, Fulton Gardens on the night of the sixteenth, she plunged into her story without any hesitation or trace of nervousness. "'At about half-past eight,' she said, 'or it may have been later--I won't swear as to the time--there was a ring at the front-door bell. I was down in the pantry, and as I came upstairs I heard the office door being opened. When I got into the passage I saw Mr. Jessup standing in the doorway of the office. He had his spectacles on his nose, and a pen in his hand. He looked as if he had just got up from his desk.' "'"If that's young Leighton," he said to me, "tell him I'll see him to-morrow. I can't be bothered now." Then he went back into the office and shut the door.