“Did you happen to notice, Mrs. Pierce, whether Miss Lloyd was wearing a yellow rose when you saw her in her room?”

Mrs. Pierce hesitated. She looked decidedly embarrassed, and seemed disinclined to answer. But she might have known that to hesitate and show embarrassment was almost equivalent to an affirmative answer to the coroner's question. At last she replied,

“I don't know; I didn't notice.”

This might have been a true statement, but I think no one in the room believed it. The coroner tried again.

“Try to think, Mrs. Pierce. It is important that we should know if Miss Lloyd was wearing a yellow rose.”

“Yes,” flared out Mrs. Pierce angrily, “so that you can prove she went down to her uncle's office later and dropped a piece of her rose there! But I tell you I don't remember whether she was wearing a rose or not, and it wouldn't matter if she had on forty roses! If Florence Lloyd says she didn't go down-stairs, she didn't.”

“I think we all believe in Miss Lloyd's veracity,” said Mr. Monroe, “but it is necessary to discover where those rose petals in the library came from. You saw the flowers in her room, Mrs. Pierce?”

“Yes, I believe I did. But I paid no attention to them, as Florence nearly always has flowers in her room.”

“Would you have heard Miss Lloyd if she had gone down-stairs after you left her?”

“I don't know,” said Mrs. Pierce, doubtfully.

“Is your room next to hers?”

“No, not next.”

“Is it on the same corridor?”

“No.”

“Around a corner?”

“Yes.”

“And at some distance?”

“Yes.” Mrs. Pierce's answers became more hesitating as she saw the drift of Mr. Monroe's questions. Clearly, she was trying to shield Florence, if necessary, at the expense of actual truthfulness.

“Then,” went on Mr. Monroe, inexorably, “I understand you to say that you think you would have heard Miss Lloyd, had she gone down-stairs, although your room is at a distance and around a corner and the hall and stairs are thickly carpeted. Unless you were listening especially, Mrs. Pierce, I think you would scarcely have heard her descend.”

“Well, as she didn't go down, of course I didn't hear her,” snapped Mrs. Pierce, with the feminine way of settling an argument by an unprovable statement.

Mr. Monroe began on another tack.

“When you went to Miss Lloyd's room,” he said, “was the maid, Elsa, there?”

“Miss Lloyd had just dismissed her for the night.”

“What was Miss Lloyd doing when you went to her room?”

“She was looking over some gowns that she proposed sending to the cleaner's.”

The coroner fairly jumped. He remembered the newspaper clipping of a cleaner's advertisement, which was even now in the gold bag before him. Though all the jurors had seen it, it had not been referred to in the presence of the women.

Recovering himself at once, he said quietly “Was not that rather work for Miss Lloyd's maid?”

“Oh, Elsa would pack and send them, of course,” said Mrs. Pierce carelessly. “Miss Lloyd was merely deciding which ones needed cleaning.”

“Do you know where they were to be sent?”

Mrs. Pierce looked a little surprised at this question.

“Miss Lloyd always sends her things to Carter & Brown's,” she said.

Now, Carter & Brown was the firm name on the advertisement, and it was evident at once that the coroner considered this a damaging admission.

He sat looking greatly troubled, but before he spoke again, Mr. Parmalee made an observation that decidedly raised that young man in my estimation.

“Well,” he said, “that's pretty good proof that the gold bag doesn't belong to Miss Lloyd.”

“How so?” asked the coroner, who had thought quite the contrary.

“Why, if Miss Lloyd always sends her goods to be cleaned to Carter & Brown, why would she need to cut their address from a newspaper and save it?”

At first I thought the young man's deduction distinctly clever, but on second thought I wasn't so sure. Miss Lloyd might have wanted that address for a dozen good reasons. To my mind, it proved neither her ownership of the gold bag, nor the contrary.

In fact, I thought the most important indication that the bag might be hers lay in the story Elsa told about the cousin who sailed to Germany. Somehow that sounded untrue to me, but I was more than willing to believe it if I could.

I longed for Fleming Stone, who, I felt sure, could learn from the bag and its contents the whole truth about the crime and the criminal.

But I had been called to take charge of the case, and my pride forbade me to call on any one for help.

I had scorned deductions from inanimate objects, but I resolved to study that bag again, and study it more minutely. Perhaps there were some threads or shreds caught in its meshes that might point to its owner. I remembered a detective story I read once, in which the whole discovery of the criminal depended on identifying a few dark blue woollen threads which were found in a small pool of candle grease on a veranda roof. As it turned out, they were from the trouser knee of a man who had knelt there to open a window. The patent absurdity of leaving threads from one's trouser knee, amused me very much, but the accommodating criminals in fiction almost always leave threads or shreds behind them. And surely a gold-mesh bag, with its thousands of links would be a fine trap to catch some threads of evidence, however minute they might be.

Furthermore I decided to probe further into that yellow rose business. I was not at all sure that those petals I found on the floor had anything to do with Miss Lloyd's roses, but it must be a question possible of settlement, if I went about it in the right way. At any rate, though I had definite work ahead of me, my duty just now was to listen to the forthcoming evidence, though I could not help thinking I could have put questions more to the point than Mr. Monroe did.

Of course the coroner's inquest was not formally conducted as a trial by jury would be, and so any one spoke, if he chose, and the coroner seemed really glad when suggestions were offered him.

At this point Philip Crawford rose.

“It is impossible,” he said, “not to see whither these questions are tending. But you are on the wrong tack, Mr. Coroner. No matter how evidence may seem to point toward Florence Lloyd's association with this crime, it is only seeming. That gold bag might have been hers and it might not. But if she says it isn't, why, then it isn't! Notwithstanding the state of affairs between my brother and his niece, there is not the shadow of a possibility that the young woman is implicated in the slightest degree, and the sooner you leave her name out of consideration, and turn your search into other channels, the sooner you will find the real criminal.”

It was not so much the words of Philip Crawford, as the sincere way in which they were spoken, that impressed me. Surely he was right; surely this beautiful girl was neither principal nor accessory in the awful crime which, by a strange coincidence, gave to her her fortune and her lover.

“Mr. Crawford's right,” said Lemuel Porter. “If this jury allows itself to be misled by a gold purse and two petals of a yellow rose, we are unworthy to sit on this case. Why, Mr. Coroner, the long French windows in the office were open, or, at least, unfastened all through the night. We have that from the butler's testimony. He didn't lock them last night; they were found unlocked this morning. Therefore, I hold that an intruder, either man or woman, may have come in during the night, accomplished the fatal deed, and departed without any one being the wiser. That this intruder was a woman, is evidenced by the bag she left behind her. For, as Mr. Crawford has said, if Miss Lloyd denies the ownership of that bag, it is not hers.”

After all, these declarations were proof, of a sort. If Mr. Porter and Mr. Philip Crawford, who had known Florence Lloyd for years, spoke thus positively of her innocence, it could not be doubted.

And then the voice of Parmalee again sounded in my ears.

“Of course Mr. Porter and Mr. Crawford would stand up for Miss Lloyd; it would be strange if they didn't. And of course, Mrs. Pierce will do all she can to divert suspicion. But the evidences are against her.”

“They only seem to be,” I corrected. “Until we prove the gold bag and the yellow rose to be hers; there is no evidence against her at all.”

“She also had motive and opportunity. Those two points are of quite as much importance as evidence.”

“She had motive and opportunity,” I agreed, “but they were not exclusive. As Mr. Porter pointed out, the open windows gave opportunity that was world wide; and as to motive, how are we to know who had or who hadn't it.”

“You're right, I suppose. Perhaps I am too positive of Miss Lloyd's implication in the matter, but I'm quite willing to be convinced to the contrary.”

The remarks of Mr. Parmalee were of course not audible to any one save myself. But the speeches which had been made by Mr. Crawford and Mr. Porter, and which, strange to say, amounted to an arraignment and a vindication almost in the same breath, had a decided effect upon the assembly.

Mrs. Pierce began to weep silently. Gregory Hall looked startled, as if the mere idea of Miss Lloyd's implication was a new thought to him. Lawyer Randolph looked considerably disturbed, and I at once suspected that his legal mind would not allow him to place too much dependence on the statements of the girl's sympathetic friends.

Mr. Hamilton, another of the jurors whom I liked, seemed to be thoughtfully weighing the evidence. He was not so well acquainted with Miss Lloyd as the two men who had just spoken in her behalf, and he made a remark somewhat diffidently.

“I agree,” he said, “with the sentiments just expressed; but I also think that we should endeavor to find some further clues or evidence. Had Mr. Crawford any enemies who would come at night to kill him? Or are there any valuables missing? Could robbery have been the motive?”

“It does not seem so,” replied the coroner. “Nothing is known to be missing. Mr. Crawford's watch and pocket money were not disturbed.”

“The absence of the weapon is a strange factor in the case,” put in Mr. Orville, apparently desirous of having his voice heard as well as those of the other jurors.

“Yes,” agreed Mr. Monroe; “and yet it is not strange that the criminal carried away with him what might have been a proof of his identity.”

“Does Miss Lloyd own a pistol?” blurted out Mr. Parmalee.

Gregory Hall gave him an indignant look, but Coroner Monroe seemed rather glad to have the question raised—probably so that it could be settle at once in the negative.

And it was.

“No,” replied Mrs. Pierce, when the query was put to her. “Both Florence and I are desperately afraid of firearms. We wouldn't dream of owning a pistol—either of us.”

Of course, this was significant, but in no way decisive. Granting that Miss Lloyd could have been the criminal, it would have been possible for her secretly to procure a revolver, and secretly to dispose of it afterward. Then, too, a small revolver had been used. To be sure, this did not necessarily imply that a woman had used it, but, taken in connection with the bag and the rose petals, it gave food for thought.

But the coroner seemed to think Mrs. Pierce's assertions greatly in Miss Lloyd's favor, and, being at the end of his list of witnesses, he inquired if any one else in the room knew of anything that could throw light on the matter.

No one responded to this invitation, and the coroner then directed the jury to retire to find a verdict. The six men passed into another room, and I think no one who awaited their return apprehended any other result than the somewhat unsatisfactory one of “person or persons unknown.”

And this was what the foreman announced when the jury returned after their short collocation.

Then, as a jury, they were dismissed, but from that moment the mystery of Joseph Crawford's death became the absorbing thought of all West Sedgwick.

“The murderer of my brother shall be found and brought to justice!” declared Philip Crawford, and all present seemed to echo his vow.

Then and there, Mr. Crawford retained Lawyer Randolph to help him in running down the villain, and, turning to me, asked to engage my services also.

To this, I readily agreed, for I greatly desired to go on with the matter, and cared little whether I worked for an individual or for the State.

Of course Mr. Crawford's determination to find the murderer proved anew his conviction that Florence Lloyd was above all suspicion, but in the face of certain details of the evidence so far, I could not feel so absolutely certain of this.

However, it was my business to follow up every clue, or apparent clue, and every bit of evidence, and this I made up my mind to do, regardless of consequences.

I confess it was difficult for me to feel regardless of consequences, for I had a haunting fear that the future was going to look dark for Florence Lloyd. And if it should be proved that she was in any way responsible for or accessory to this crime, I knew I should wish I had had nothing to do with discovering that fact. But back of this was an undefined but insistent conviction that the girl was innocent, and that I could prove it. This may have been an inordinate faith in my own powers, or it may have been a hope born of my admiration for the young woman herself. For there is no doubt, that for the first time in my life I was taking a serious interest in a woman's personality. Heretofore I had been a general admirer of womankind, and I had naturally treated them all with chivalry and respect. But now I had met one whom I desired to treat in a far tenderer way, and to my chagrin I realized that I had no right to entertain such thoughts toward a girl already betrothed.

So I concluded to try my best to leave Florence Lloyd's personality out of the question, to leave my feelings toward her out of the question, and to devote my energies to real work on the case and prove by intelligent effort that I could learn facts from evidence without resorting to the microscopic methods of Fleming Stone. I purposely ignored the fact that I would have been only too glad to use these methods had I the power to do so!