“Ah!” Rawson could not hide his exultation. “Now we’ve got something we can get our teeth into.”

“Yes.” Bassett took the pieces and studied them in the light. “That’s what it is. She wore a wide sash round her waist with ends that hung down edged with gold fringe. This is a bit of it.”

“Well,” said Williams, “that’s a starter anyhow. She was in here.”

Rawson sat on the bench and drew the table into its former position:

[Pg 167]

[Pg 167]

“It not only proves she was in here, but it proves a good deal more. This is the way she was, with the table as we found it close in front of her. The ends of her sash would have been in contact with the table legs. Now she jumped up quickly—do you get that? If she’d gone slow or had time to think she’d have felt the pull and unloosed the sash—but she sprang up, didn’t notice.” He looked from one to the other, his lean face alight.

“Frightened,” said Bassett.

“So frightened she didn’t feel it, and moved with such force she tore the fringe off. That scare took her up from the seat and sent her flying through the doorway for the Point.”

“Hold on now,” said Williams. “If she was as scared as that why didn’t she go for the house where there were people?”

“Because she was too scared to think. Some one with a pistol was on the other side of the table.” He rose and went to the entrance facing the Point. “And the person with the pistol shot [Pg 168]at her from here—winged her as she ran.” He turned to Bassett. “That’s why you saw no one when you looked out after you first heard the shot. The murderer was in here lying low.”

[Pg 168]

“Yes.” Bassett thought back over the moment when he had stood in the living-room doorway. “That’s the only place he could have been or I’d have seen him. But they wouldn’t have been any time together—couldn’t have had a quarrel or a scene. According to Mrs. Cornell it was only six or seven minutes after she saw Sybil go out that she heard the shot. That would give them only two or three minutes in here.”

“Time enough to draw a gun and back it up with a few sentences. It bears out what I’ve thought from the start—not an accidental meeting but a date, to which the woman came unsuspecting 

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