"You said just now at Nathaniel's," I burst out, "that Le Geyt would
not be hanged: he would commit suicide. What did you mean by that? What
reason had you for thinking so?"
Hilda sank into a chair by the open window, pulled a flower abstractedly
from the vase at her side, and began picking it to pieces, floret after
floret, with twitching fingers. She was deeply moved. "Well, consider
his family history," she burst out at last, looking up at me with her
large brown eyes as she reached the last petal. "Heredity counts.... And
after such a disaster!"
She said "disaster," not "crime"; I noted mentally the reservation
implied in the word.
"Heredity counts," I answered. "Oh, yes. It counts much. But what about
Le Geyt's family history?" I could not recall any instance of suicide
among his forbears.
"Well--his mother's father was General Faskally, you know," she replied,
after a pause, in her strange, oblique manner. "Mr. Le Geyt is General
Faskally's eldest grandson."
"Exactly," I broke in, with a man's desire for solid fact in place of
vague intuition. "But I fail to see quite what that has to do with it."
"The General was killed in India during the Mutiny.
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