Page:Bentley- Trent's Last Case (Nelson, nd).djvu/279

Rh and she leaned back in the sofa, calmly regarding him.

'Then,' said Trent, who had followed this with earnest attention, 'we are forced back on two other possibilities, which I had not thought worth much consideration until this moment. Accepting what you say, he might still conceivably have killed in self-defence; or he might have done so by accident.'

The lady nodded. 'Of course I thought of those two explanations when I read your manuscript.'

'And I suppose you felt, as I did myself, that in either of those cases the natural thing, and obviously the safest thing, for him to do was to make a public statement of the truth, instead of setting up a series of deceptions which would certainly stamp him as guilty in the eyes of the law, if anything went wrong with them.'

'Yes,' she said wearily, 'I thought over all that until my head ached. And I thought somebody else might have done it, and that he was somehow screening the guilty person. But that seemed wild. I could see no light in the mystery, and after a while I simply let it alone. All I was clear about was that Mr.