Page:Alice Stuyvesant - The Vanity Box.djvu/325

 good to Barr. There was no proof but their own word that Barr didn't go downstairs and shoot Lady Hereward, when he had heard her voice and knew she was alone in the Tower. He, unassisted, couldn't have proved that she had taken his revolver, and was in the habit of going about with it in a handbag when she walked in the woods. Was the jury likely to believe that Barr left England with the one object of screening his late employer, Sir Ian Hereward, and that it was entirely for Hereward's sake, not at all for his own and Nora Verney's, that he intended to keep silent when arrested and brought back from France? Not they. Circumstantial evidence was strong against him.

On the other hand, there was no proof except Sir Ian's word that he had gone out of the Tower before the shots were fired. In his statement he actually called attention to the fact that neither Barr nor Miss Verney heard him go, and that they both believed him guilty of murder.

As he made the case stand, it was simply a question for the jury to decide whether his word should be taken or not. If not, which had killed Millicent Hereward, her husband, or the young man whose prospects in life she had tried to destroy?

As for the suicide theory, if it hadn't been for what happened afterward, it would have been very difficult if not impossible to establish. As you know (for I sent you the papers with that passage marked), two