Free The House of the Whispering Pines by Anna Katherine Green Page B

hours. It was
not your letter—if your story is true about that letter—or she would
have shown its effect immediately upon receiving it; that is, in the
early evening. And she did not. Helen, one of the maids, declares that
she saw her some time after you left the house, and that she wore
anything but a troubled look; that, in fact, her countenance was beaming
and so beautiful that, accustomed as the girl was to her young mistress's
good looks, she was more than struck by her appearance and spoke of it
afterwards at the ball. A telling circumstance against you, Ranelagh, not
only contradicting your own story but showing that her after condition
sprang from some sudden and extreme apprehension in connection with her
sister. Did you speak?"
    No, I had not spoken. I had nothing to say. I was too deeply shaken by
what he had just told me, to experience anything but the utmost confusion
of ideas. Carmel beaming and beautiful at an hour I had supposed her
suffering and full of struggle! I could not reconcile it with the letter
she had written me, or with that understanding with her sister which
ended so hideously in The Whispering Pines.
    The lawyer, seeing my helpless state, proceeded with his presentation of
my case as it looked to unprejudiced eyes.
    "Miss Cumberland comes to the club-house; so do you. You have not the
keys and so go searching about the building till you find an unlocked
window by which you both enter. There are those who say you purposely
left this window unfastened when you went about the house the day
before; that you dropped the keys in her house where they would be sure
to be found, and drove down to the station and stood about there for a
good half hour, in order to divert suspicion from yourself afterwards and
create an alibi in case it should be wanted. I do not believe any of this
myself, not since accepting your assurance of innocence, but there are
those who do believe it firmly and discern in the whole affair a cool and
premeditated murder. Your passion for Carmel, while not generally known,
has not passed unsuspected by your or her intimates; and this in itself
is enough to give colour to these suspicions, even if you had not gone so
far as to admit its power over you and the extremes to which you were
willing to go to secure the wife you wished. So much for the situation as
it appears to outsiders. Of the circumstantial evidence which links you
personally to this crime, we have already spoken. It is very strong and
apparently unassailable. But truth is truth, and if you only felt free to
bare your whole soul to me as you now decline to do, I should not despair
of finding some weak link in the chain which seems so satisfactory to the
police and, I am forced to add, to the general public."
    "Charles—"
    I was very near unbosoming myself to him at that moment. But I caught
myself back in time. While Carmel lay ill and unconscious, I would not
clear my name at her expense by so much as a suggestion.
    "Charles," I repeated, but in a different tone and with a different
purpose, "how do they account for the cordial that was drunk—the two
emptied glasses and the flask which were found in the adjacent closet?"
    "It's one of the affair's conceded incongruities. Miss Cumberland is a
well-known temperance woman. Had the flask and glasses not come from her
house, you would get no one to believe that she had had anything to do
with them. Have you any hint to give on this point? It would be a welcome
addition to our case."
    Alas! I was as much puzzled by those emptied cordial glasses as he was,
and told him so; also by the presence of the third unused one. As I dwelt
in thought on the latter circumstance, I remembered the observation which
Coroner Perry had made concerning it.
    "Coroner Perry speaks of a third and unused glass which was found with
the flask," I ventured, tentatively. "He seemed to consider it an
important item, hiding some truth that would materially help this case.
What do you think, or