“Not for an instant. I did not do justice either to her misery or to her conscience. I fear that I have never done her justice in anyway. I thought her light, pleasure-loving. I did not know that it was assumed to hide a terrible secret.”
“Then you had no knowledge of the contract she had entered into while a school-girl?”
“Not in the least. Another woman, and not myself, had been her confidante; a woman who has since died. No intimation of her first unfortunate marriage had ever reached me till Mr. Jeffrey rushed in upon me that Tuesday morning with her dreadful confession on his lips.”
The district attorney, who did not seem quite satisfied on a certain point passed over by the major, now took the opportunity of saying:
“You assure us that you had no idea that this once lighthearted sister of yours meditated suicide when she left you?”
“Then why did you immediately go to Mr. Jeffrey’s drawer, where you could have no business, unless it was to see if she had taken his pistol with her?”
Miss Tuttle’s head fell and a soft flush broke through the pallor of her cheek.
“Because I was thinking of _him_. Because I was terrified for _him_. He had left the house the morning before in a half-maddened condition and had not come back to sleep or eat since. I did not know what a man so outraged in every sacred feeling of love and honor might be tempted to do. I thought of suicide. I remembered the old house and how he had said, ‘I don’t believe her. I don’t believe she ever did so cold-blooded an act, or that any such dreadful machinery is in that house. I never shall believe it till I have seen and handled it myself. It is a nightmare, Cora. We are insane.’ I thought of this, sirs, and when I went into her room, to change the place of the little note in the book, I went to his bureau drawer, not to look for the pistol—I did not think of that then,—but to see if the keys of the Moore house were still there. I knew that they were kept in this drawer, for I had been present in the room when they were brought in after the wedding. I had also been short-sighted enough to conclude that if they were gone it was he who had taken them. They were gone, and that was why I flew immediately from the house to the old place in Waverley Avenue. I was concerned for Mr. Jeffrey! I feared to find him there, demented or dead.”