"I beg your pardon, Mr. Henshaw," Gifford objected with decision, "there can be, and is, a very great deal more than a doubt of it."
Henshaw shot a searching glance at the man who spoke so confidently, as though trying to probe what, if anything, was behind his words.
"Perhaps you know then," he returned with his sneering smile, "how otherwise, if the lady had no hand in it, my brother came by his death?"
"Then," still the smile of sneering incredulity, "it is clearly your duty to make it known."
"Clearly," Gifford assented in a calm tone. "That is why I asked you to come here this afternoon."
Henshaw was looking at him with a sort of malicious curiosity. In spite of his smartness he seemed at a loss to divine what the other was driving at, unless it were a well-studied line of bluff. But that Gifford could have, apart from what Edith Morriston might have told him, any intimate knowledge of the tragedy was inconceivable.
"I shall be glad to hear what you have to say, Mr. Gifford," he responded, in perhaps much greater curiosity than he chose to show.
"Then I have to inform you positively," Gifford answered, "that your brother's fatal wound was the result of a pure accident."
Coming from Edith Morriston's champion, there was nothing surprising in that assertion. Certainly if that were the other's strong suit he could easily beat it. It was therefore in a tone of confidence and relief that he demanded, "You can prove it?"
"Your own?" Henshaw's question was put with a curling lip.
Henshaw's contemptuous incredulity was by no means diminished even by the other's confident attitude.
Gifford gave a short laugh. "Naturally you do not take my meaning. Obviously you think I am not a competent witness, that I know nothing except by hearsay. You are, extraordinary as it may seem, quite wrong. My testimony would be of nothing but what I myself saw and heard."
"What do you mean?" Henshaw had for a moment seemed to be calculating the probability of this monstrous suggestion being a fact, and had dismissed it with the contempt which showed itself in his question.
"I mean," Gifford replied with quiet assurance, "that I happened to be a witness of the interview in the tower-room between your brother and Miss Morriston, that I was there when he received his death-wound, and that it was I whom the girl Haynes saw descending by a rope from the top window."