I slipped out of the window. Mrs. Herbert started forward to detain me.
"A duel," she exclaimed, in a tone as though the idea became yet more inconceivable to her. "Oh no! Not a duel."
"No, not a duel," I replied across my shoulder, "only the pretence of one;" and while my head was thus turned a pistol-shot rang from the Wilderness.
It sounded like the crack of a whip, and I might have counted it no more than that but I saw a wisp of blue smoke float upwards above a shrubbery and hang curling this way and that in the sunlight.
"God save us," I cried, "but he carried a pistol!" and I made as though I would run across the terrace towards him. But or ever I could move, I felt a hand tighten and tighten upon my arm. I tried to shake it off.
"You do not understand," I exclaimed. "He carried a pistol. It was a pistol that we heard. Maybe he was looking to the priming. Maybe he is wounded I must go to him;" and I seized Mrs. Herbert's hand at the wrist and sought to drag it away from my sleeve. I felt her fingers only grip more closely. I dropped her wrist and began to unclasp them, one by one.
"It is you who do not understand," she said, "and he is not wounded."
She spoke in a dry, passionless voice, which daunted me more than the words she uttered. I turned and looked at her in perplexity. Her face was like paper, even her lips were white—and her eyes shone from it sunken and black; I was reminded of them afterwards by the sight of a black tarn set in a moor of snow, which I was destined to look upon one sad November afternoon in this same year. They seemed to have grown bigger, the better to express the horror which she felt.
"He is not wounded. Be sure—be very sure of that!" she continued, nodding her head at me in a queer, matter-of-fact way, which, joined with the contrast of her face, had something, to my thinking, awsomely grotesque.
"What do you mean?" I gasped, and in a momentary weakness staggered back against the framework of the window. I felt her clasp strengthen upon my arm, drawing me within the parlour.