"I am here all day. I am staying on to superintend the household for a little while—at Mr. Tangye's request. But I prefer to go home to my sister's at night."
"But to oblige us? Just for a night or two?" Pointer wheedled. "Something might turn up after you had left here?"
Miss Saunders looked impatient.
"I never go back on a decision. Once I have made up my mind, I stick to it."
"Admirable trait," Wilmot murmured in mock admiration.
"We should, of course, expect the Insurance Society to pay for the convenience," Pointer went on, "a pound a night is the usual thing, I believe, in a case of this kind, where it's done merely to help the investigation, and is only a question of two, or at most three nights." He turned to Wilmot. "Quite so; a pound a night," Wilmot agreed.
Miss Saunders pondered the proposal for the first time. Evidently Pointer's improvised tariff appealed to her. But after a minute she shook her head. "I prefer to go to my sister's, as I have arranged."
There was a pause.
"Did any one see you leave the house yesterday when you went to the circulating library?" Haviland asked.
"I don't know. But at any rate the person who served me with tea in the Japanese tea-room next door might remember me. She knows me by sight quite well." Miss Saunders spoke indifferently.
"Did Mrs. Tangye want any particular book brought back, or leave it to you?" Pointer asked.
"She left it to me. I found nothing that she would care for, so I brought home the book she had given me. She had not quite finished it I knew."
"Did you ask the librarian for any book?"
"No."
"You didn't change any book whatever there?"
"No."
Pointer glanced at Wilmot.
"Now going back to the cause of Mrs. Tangye's death," the newspaper man began, "which is what I want to establish, you feel sure that she didn't shoot herself intentionally?"
"Quite sure. Why should she shoot herself? She had everything in the world that she wanted, hadn't she?" the last words came with a rush.
"Do you mean Mr. Tangye?" Wilmot asked so blankly that Haviland bit his lip.
"I mean everything." But Miss Saunders spoke more guardedly. "Mrs. Tangye wasn't used to the kind of life he gave her. A motor, and maids, and that. She told me herself once that she had known what it was to be bitterly poor."
The stipend of the Reverend Charles Headly having been under three hundred a year, out of which he had to pay a curate, the men thought that that was quite likely.
"Then you think she was happy?" persisted Wilmot.
"As much as her temperament would let her, I do. She was one of those women who always want what they haven't got.. She was always contrasting Mr. Tangye with Mr. Branscombe's perfections."
"That doesn't sound to me a happy life," Haviland murmured.
Miss Saunders flashed him an ironic glance.
"You mean in fact that they quarrelled?" he persisted.
"They led the usual married life," she said dryly. Wilmot laughed, while Haviland, who was a very happy man in his home, looked at her with marked distaste.
"Mr. Tangye says you were the last person to see Mrs. Tangye's keys. Could you tell us when that was?" Pointer asked suddenly.
Her eyes were on his as he spoke. Far back in them a spark glowed suddenly. The question had obviously come as a complete surprise. And all three men thought that the surprise was not the only emotion stirred. There was anger.
And there was something that for a second suggested dismay. But she looked down her nose immediately, and said with perfect composure, "I can't think that he would say such a thing!" This was true enough.
"My mistake doubtless," Pointer said easily, and changed the subject to the visitor, the supposed Mrs. Cranbourn, Miss Saunders said that she saw no one as she ran down the stairs. She thought that the caller must have stepped into the drawing-room and let herself out later on.
"But the reporter who came back with the maid said that you remained in the hall till the police came."
"That's quite true." Miss Saunders looked puzzled. "But perhaps she left after the police arrived. We were all in the morning-room together for a time then."
"Impossible. I had a man posted at both doors. Front and back." Haviland was very certain of this.
"I hadn't thought of it before. What did become of her?" Miss Saunders looked uneasy.
"Leaving her on one side for the moment, how did you first learn that Mrs. Tangye was dead?"
Miss Saunders repeated what she had told Haviland, and the Coroner.
"You came immediately Florence screamed?" Pointer's tone suggested a delay. A suspicious delay.
"Certainly."
"At her first scream?" Pointer persisted. As though he intended to prove that in some way the companion had been dilatory.
"I ran down immediately. She only screamed the once. I glanced in at the open morning-room door, and hurried after her to try and stop her making a scene in the street." Miss Saunders spoke contemptuously.
"But Mrs. Tangye was not sitting where you could see her from the door."
Miss Saunders made a movement with the edge of her cupped hand, as though brushing off some imaginary crumbs from the table top beside her.
The room was very still.
"I may have gone in far enough to see her sitting in her chair," she said finally.
"And by merely glancing at her from a distance, you—without any medical knowledge—were able to tell the reporter who met the maid that no help was wanted? That he need not go into the room where Mrs. Tangye was?" Pointer spoke gravely. "You took that formidable responsibility on yourself after one look?"
"Didn't you try to do something for her?" Wilmot burst out. Both he and Haviland were watching the woman intently, at whom Pointer seemed barely to glance. She looked quite unruffled. But again her hand swept the table top, with a slow, considering movement.
"I suppose I must have run up to her," she said meditatively. "As to helping her—" there was something repressed in Miss Saunders level tones, "of course, I didn't want to touch her till the police came."
Haviland nodded official approval of that eminently correct attitude. But Pointer looked very wooden.
"Why? Did you think a crime had been committed?" She passed a furtive tongue over her thin lips.
"Such an absurd idea never entered my mind."
"Any more than the equally absurd one of trying to see if you could do something for the poor lady," Wilmot retorted.
She did not shift her eyes from Pointer, though she answered the comment.
"One does not need to be the king's physician, nor yet a gifted detective," her gaze was mocking, "to know what a bullet wound over a heart means, with a dropped revolver on the floor by the body's side."
"To go back to what happened after Florence screamed," Pointer continued; "you still maintain that you were able to run down the stairs, get across the whole of the morning-room to the recess, make certain that Mrs. Tangye was dead, get out of the room again, and be seen standing in the front door before Florence had more than left the house? The reporter said that as the door opened, and she rushed out, you stepped into the open doorway behind her."
"It all happened so swiftly," Regina Saunders muttered. "Still, human beings take some time to move from one spot to another, you know."
"This cross-examination