“Yes; I could not speak, and I thought that would tell Miss Dupuy that Miss Van Norman had taken her own life.”

“You thought, then, that Miss Van Norman wrote the message?”

“I thought so then⁠—and I think so now.”

This, of course, produced a sensation, but it was only evidenced by a deeper silence on the part of the startled audience.

“But Miss Dupuy asserts that she wrote it,” said the coroner.

To this Schuyler Carleton merely gave a slight bow of his handsome head, but it said as plainly as words that his belief was not altered by Miss Dupuy’s assertion.

“Granting for the moment, then,” went on Mr. Benson, “that Miss Van Norman did write it, is the message intelligible to you?”