What can I say to them?
What can anybody say?
Yet I do not see how we can be held responsible for so unprecedented an attack as this, do you ?" Mr.Gryce made no answer.

He had turned his back toward the stair-head and was wondering if this easy explanation of a tragedy so peculiar as to have no prototype in all of the hundreds of cases he had been called upon to investigate in a long life of detective activity would satisfy all the other persons then in the building.

It was his present business to find out--to search and probe among the dozen or two people he saw collected below, for the witness who had seen or had heard some slight thing as yet unrevealed which would throw a different light upon this matter.

For his mind--or shall we say the almost unerring instinct of this ancient delver into human hearts ?--would not accept without question this theory of sudden madness in one of Mrs.Taylor's appearance, strange and inexplicable as her conduct seemed.

Though it was quite among the possibilities that she had struck the fatal blow and in the manner mentioned, it was equally clear to his mind that she had not done it in an access of frenzy.