Chapter Seventeen.

Dazzled by the lightning glare, for a few instants Teresa could distinguish nothing but a heap of blackness. Then she saw Wilbraham kneeling on the ground with Sylvia in his arms.

“Hold her—she’s hurt!” he cried hoarsely.

As the doctor and Teresa raised her, he sprung to his feet and dashed into the gaping darkness.

Teresa never could remember how the next few minutes passed. The shot must have startled others, for Nina, the padrone, Colonel Maxwell, all came running. Mrs Brodrick, too, was there.

“Take her through the window to her room,” she said quietly.

“Come on then,” said Colonel Maxwell, trying to speak cheerfully; “somebody open the window on the other side, and we shall soon see what’s wrong. Tell them, for Heaven’s sake, not to make such a confounded row,” he added to the Hungarian, who knew a little English.

Teresa was voiceless, though all that was to be done she did with absolute precision. She helped to raise her, helped to lay her on the bed, sent the others away, and stayed alone with the doctor and her dead.

For Sylvia was dead.

The shot, which might have missed Wilbraham, had struck her full in the heart. Probably, in her black dress, undistinguishable in the darkness, she had been altogether unseen. There had not been time for a cry, a quiver. The life had gone out of her before she dropped.

The little Hungarian doctor, his rosy face strangely moved, raised himself, and looked pitifully at Teresa, who held the candle. She stopped his faltering words, putting up her hand.

“I know,” she said. “I knew it from the first.”

He wanted very much to comfort her.

“There could have been no pain, no consciousness—”

“Oh yes, there was pain enough—as much as she could bear!” Teresa cried, the words wrung from her by the torture of an almost unbearable anguish. “If only she had died yesterday!”

The doctor looked at her, and realised that here was something he could not understand, and had better not question.

“You are overdone, Donna Teresa, and no wonder, after such a terrible shock,” he said quietly. “And there is also your grandmother to be considered. Will you go to her room, and take what I will send you? I will inform the others, and see to the necessary details. Indeed, you should not remain here.”

His mind ran professionally forward to all that had to be done: the police, the strangers who would have to come and see for themselves. For this was no quiet death-bed where the mourners might sit silent in the hush of sorrow. Already there was a clamour of weeping outside the door—Peppina’s the loudest—and Teresa’s strange words made him afraid for her brain, so that he pressed her again.

“Send in your own woman. She has got her wits about her. Afterwards, I give you my word, you shall come back.”

Teresa waved him aside with a quiet gesture full of strength.

“I shall not leave her,” she said, “and you need have no fears for me. There must be a great deal for you to do. Please see to it, and let Colonel Maxwell help you. Will you go to my grandmother first, and ask her to come to me in ten minutes? She and Nina—no one else.”

So she had ten minutes alone with her dead—ten minutes in which to stand and gaze at the fair young face, unmarred by the withering finger of illness, still round, still soft, still smiling, yet suddenly invested with that great dignity which Death alone can give to those he calls. Never before had Sylvia looked inscrutable, mysterious, far away, far above them all. Teresa touched her, kissed her, strained her in her arms. She was not yet cold; her young limbs were still supple. Teresa could have believed life was lingering but for that look—the look of something more than life, something into which life had suddenly sprung, something which came back across a gulf. In one little moment, Sylvia, ignorant Sylvia, had solved the great problem, and smiled at them from beyond an immeasurable vastness. Teresa stretched out her arms—speechless—and grasped air.

A sound disturbed her, and she looked round. There stood Wilbraham, haggard, breathless, drenched to the skin, changed almost out of recognition. At the door Nina had tried to stop him, but he pushed her aside. The two eyed each other.

“Too—late?”

Teresa only just caught the whisper.

“It was momentary.” Her quiet amazed herself.

His eyes persistently held away from Sylvia. He raised his hand to his wet hair, fingering it impatiently.

“I did not catch him.”

“Him? Who?”

“The fellow who shot her—who shot at me.”

“Who?” Teresa frowned, trying to remember. In the rush of the tragedy, she had forgotten that some one was responsible for it. “Oh,” she cried desperately, “what of that!”

She turned away again. Against his will, Wilbraham’s blood-shot eyes followed hers to where Sylvia lay, serenely lifted above his level.

“God forgive me!” he groaned.

And before that supreme look of her dead, Teresa’s anger dropped into pity, and the saving tears rushed to her eyes.

“And she, too!—She does, she does!” she cried brokenly, stretching out her hands.

He seized them.

“And you?”

“And I.”

He had his forgiveness. He would never have more.

The End.