The audience was alert at once.

“Kindly proceed, Doctor,” the coroner said.

“My home is in Englewood, two miles from Casanova,” the doctor began.  “In the absence of Doctor Walker, a number of Casanova people have been consulting me.  A month ago—­five weeks, to be exact—­a woman whom I had never seen came to my office.  She was in deep mourning and kept her veil down, and she brought for examination a child, a boy of six.  The little fellow was ill; it looked like typhoid, and the mother was frantic.  She wanted a permit to admit the youngster to the Children’s Hospital in town here, where I am a member of the staff, and I gave her one.  The incident would have escaped me, but for a curious thing.  Two days before Mr. Armstrong was shot, I was sent for to go to the Country Club:  some one had been struck with a golf-ball that had gone wild.  It was late when I left—­I was on foot, and about a mile from the club, on the Claysburg road, I met two people.  They were disputing violently, and I had no difficulty in recognizing Mr. Armstrong.  The woman, beyond doubt, was the one who had consulted me about the child.”

At this hint of scandal, Mrs. Ogden Fitzhugh sat up very straight.  Jamieson was looking slightly skeptical, and the coroner made a note.

“The Children’s Hospital, you say, Doctor?” he asked.

“Yes.  But the child, who was entered as Lucien Wallace, was taken away by his mother two weeks ago.  I have tried to trace them and failed.”

All at once I remembered the telegram sent to Louise by some one signed F. L. W.—­presumably Doctor Walker.  Could this veiled woman be the Nina Carrington of the message?  But it was only idle speculation.  I had no way of finding out, and the inquest was proceeding.

The report of the coroner’s physician came next.  The post-mortem examination showed that the bullet had entered the chest in the fourth left intercostal space and had taken an oblique course downward and backward, piercing both the heart and lungs.  The left lung was collapsed, and the exit point of the ball had been found in the muscles of the back to the left of the spinal column.  It was improbable that such a wound had been self-inflicted, and its oblique downward course pointed to the fact that the shot had been fired from above.  In other words, as the murdered man had been found dead at the foot of a staircase, it was probable that the shot had been fired by some one higher up on the stairs.  There were no marks of powder.  The bullet, a thirty-eight caliber, had been found in the dead man’s clothing, and was shown to the jury.

Mr. Jarvis was called next, but his testimony amounted to little.

He had been summoned by telephone to Sunnyside, had come over at once with the steward and Mr. Winthrop, at present out of town.  They had been admitted by the housekeeper, and had found the body lying at the foot of the staircase.  He had made a search for a weapon, but there was none around.  The outer entry door in the east wing had been unfastened and was open about an inch.