“This woman must be made to speak,” he said in answer to the low murmur which followed this discovery.  “If there is a doctor present——­”

Waiting, but receiving no response, he withdrew his hand from the woman’s arm and laid it on the arrow.

This roused her completely.  Loosing her own grasp upon the shaft, she cried, with sudden realization of the people pressing about her: 

“I could not draw it.  That causes death, they say.  Wait! she may still be alive.  She may have a word to speak.”

She was bending to listen.  It was hardly a favorable moment for further questioning, but the Curator in his anxiety could not refrain from saying: 

“Who is she?  What is her name and what is yours?”

“Her name?” repeated the woman, rising to face him again.  “How should I know?  I was passing through this gallery and had just stopped to take a look into the court when this young girl bounded by me from behind and flinging up her arms, fell with a deep sigh to the floor.  I saw an arrow in her breast, and——­”

Emotion choked her, and when some one asked if the girl was a stranger to her, she simply bowed her head; then, letting her gaze pass from face to face till it had completed the circle of those about her, she said in her former mechanical way: 

“My name is Ermentrude Taylor.  I came to look at the bronzes.  I should like to go now.”

But the crowd which had formed about her was too compact to allow her to pass.  Besides, the director, Mr. Roberts, had something to say first.  Working his way forward, he waited till he had attracted her attention and then remarked in his most considerate manner: 

“You will pardon these importunities, Mrs. Taylor.  I am a director of this museum, and if Mr. Jewett will excuse me,”—­here he bowed to the Curator,—­“I should like to inquire from what direction the arrow came which ended this young girl’s life?”

For a moment she stood aghast, fixing him with her eye as though to ask whither this inquiry tended.  Then with an air of intention which was not without some strange element of fear, she allowed her glance to travel across the court till it rested upon the row of connected arches facing them from the opposite gallery.

“Ah,” said he, putting her look into words, “you think the arrow came from the other side of the building.  Did you see anyone over there,—­in the gallery, I mean,—­at or before the instant of this young girl’s fall?”

She shook her head.

“Did any of you?” he urged, with his eyes on the crowd.  “Some one must have been looking that way.”

But no answer came, and the silence was fast becoming oppressive when these words, whispered by one woman to another, roused them anew and sent every glance again to the walls—­even hers for whose benefit this remark had possibly been made: 

“But there are no arrows over there.  All the arrows are here.”