"How can I when you won't confess the truth?"
"If I only dare!" Mrs. Moxton took another turn up the room, and came back to Ellis with a more determined expression on her face. "Listen, doctor! I will tell you what I can. Afterwards you can ask me what questions you will, and I shall reply to the best of my ability. Thus we shall understand one another."
Ellis looked at her trim little figure in the black dress, at the widow's cap on the fair hair, at the candid face beneath it. As has been before stated, Mrs. Moxton was comely rather than pretty, but she had a firmly-moulded chin, a resolute expression on her lips and in her grey eyes, and was, on the whole, a woman of courage and resource. How one so sensible could have tied herself to a brute like Moxton, and could have submitted to neglect and cruelty for long months was more than Ellis could understand. Perhaps it was one of those unanswerable problems of the feminine nature which women themselves cannot explain. Ellis was puzzled, and in the hope of gaining some insight into this apparently contradictory nature, waited eagerly for the promised explanation.
"On the day after the murder--in the morning, that is," said Mrs. Moxton, "I had a visitor. His card, with the name Richard Busham, was brought to me by a charwoman I engaged, but owing to the events of the previous night I refused to see him. He went away saying he would call again, but up to the present he has not done so."
"Who is Richard Busham? Do you know him?"
"Not personally. I never saw him, and he has never met me. But he is the cousin of my late husband, the nephew of Moxton of Bond Street. Now, I believe that he came to see me about the will, and I am vexed at not having admitted him."
"Why not call on him? Have you his address?"
"I heard it from Edgar. Mr. Busham is a solicitor, and has his office in Esher Lane, near the Temple. The late Mr. Moxton, of Bond Street, was a mean, shabby man who employed the cheapest labour he could get, and I believe his nephew did all his legal business for him. Now, Edgar and Mr. Busham hated one another, and when my husband was disinherited Mr. Busham was declared heir by old Moxton. If that will held good he would not waste time coming to see me, but from the very fact of his visit I believe that Edgar's father repented at the last moment, and made a new will, leaving the property to us."