I had to suppose this the moment I was compelled to reconstruct the occurrence by two phases.

Mademoiselle Stangerson had, no doubt, her own reasons for so doing, since she had told her father nothing of it, and had made it understood to the examining magistrate that the attack had taken place in the night, during the second phase.

She was forced to say that, otherwise her father would have questioned her as to her reason for having said nothing about it.
"But I could not explain the blow on the temple.

I understood it even less when I learned that the mutton-bone had been found in her room.

She could not hide the fact that she had been struck on the head, and yet that wound appeared evidently to have been inflicted during the first phase, since it required the presence of the murderer! I thought Mademoiselle Stangerson had hidden the wound by arranging her hair in bands on her forehead.
"As to the mark of the hand on the wall, that had evidently been made during the first phase--when the murderer was really there.