Explore "Unravelled Knots" by Emma Orczy on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
THE Man in the Corner proved to be right in the end. At eleven o'clock the next morning the street corners were full of newspaper placards with the flaring headlines: "Sudden death of Lord Foremeere." It was reported that on the previous evening his lordship was examining a new automatic which he had just bought and explaining the mechanism to his valet. At one moment he actually made the remark: "It is all right, it isn't loaded," but apparently there was one cartridge left in one of the chambers. His lordship, it seems, was looking straight down the barrel and his finger must accidentally have touched the trigger; anyway, according to the valet's story, there was a sudden explosion, and Lord Foremeere fell, shot right between the eyes.
The verdict at the inquest was of course one of accidental death, the coroner and jury expressing the greatest possible sympathy with Lady Foremeere and Miss St. Jude. It was only subsequently that one or two facts came to light which appeared obscure and unimportant to the man in the street, but which for me, in the light of my conversation with the Man in the Corner, bore earnest significance.