Page:Alice Stuyvesant - The Vanity Box.djvu/107

 Riding Wood, to fetch Tom Barnard, and all that had happened there. As to the details of the sight he had had to look upon in the tower room, as few questions as possible were put, for other witnesses could paint that picture. Only, at the last, the coroner desired Sir Ian to tell the jury whether he had touched the body of his dead wife, or whether he had in any way disturbed the arrangement of the tower room as he found it on entering.

"I put my hand on her breast, to see whether her heart beat," the witness answered dully, looking older and more haggard than when he had been called into the room. "I thought perhaps she might be living still. And when I found that her heart had stopped, I touched her hand. It was cold. I knew, then—there was no hope."

"Did you notice anything about her hand?"

"I noticed that her rings were gone—rings she constantly wore. And that made me look to see if her other jewelry were missing. Her bracelet-watch was gone, and a brooch she had been wearing."

"Anything else?"

"I didn't think of it then, but afterward it was discovered that a gold case, like a cigarette-case, which my wife always carried, had disappeared. Ladies call that kind of thing a vanity box."

"Could she have dropped it in the woods on the way to the Tower?"