Page:Alice Stuyvesant - The Vanity Box.djvu/132

 calibre. Another shot had been fired, but with such deficient aim as to glance off from a whalebone on the left side of a very heavily boned French corset, inflicting no wound, though the dress was cut, and the flesh underneath slightly bruised. When asked if the wound in the throat could have been self-inflicted, the doctor thought probably not, and a colleague who had been called later to view the body, agreed with him on this point. It would be barely possibly, perhaps, for a woman to commit suicide by shooting herself in the left side of the throat, an inch above the collar bone, or clavicle; but it was practically out of the question that she would do so. The natural thing was to aim at the breast, in the hope of reaching the heart; or at the temple; or occasionally a would-be suicide pushed a revolver into the mouth.

The most reasonable hypothesis was that Lady Hereward had been shot by a person who aimed at her as she stood, partly turned from him, unaware of his presence near her. The expression of horror frozen on her dead face might be accounted for by the fact that she had not died immediately after falling, but had remained conscious, and had seen the assassin bending over her. The eyes being open and raised would tend to bear out this supposition, and would seem to show, also, that she had not caught sight of her murderer before the shots were fired. Had he not hidden himself, and aimed at her from a place of