"With one or the other, there is an account to be settled before I sleep."
William Jessup seized his cap and went out into the park, leaving Ruth breathless with astonishment. She stole to the window, and looked after him, seized with uncontrollable dread. How long she sat there Ruth could never tell; but after a while, the stillness of the night was broken by the sharp report of a gun.
CHAPTER XX.
THE TWO THAT LOVED HIM.
ACROSS one of the moonlit paths of the park lay the form of a man, with his face turned upward, white and still as the moonbeams that fell upon it. A little way farther on, where the great boughs of a cedar of Lebanon flung mighty shadows on the forest sward, another figure lay, scarcely perceptible in the darkness, of which it seemed only a denser part. Between the two, some rays of light struck obliquely on the lock of a gun, which was half buried in dewy fern-leaves.
One sharp crack of that rifle had rung through the stillness of the night. Two men had fallen, and then the same sweet, calm repose settled on the park. But it was only for a minute.
Scarcely had the sound reached the gardener's cottage, when the door flew open, and dashing out through the porch came a young girl, white with fear, and wild with a terrible desire to know the worst. She had given one look behind the entrance-door as she fled through it, and saw that the gun which Richard Storms had left there was gone. She had seen it since he went, and its absence turned her fears to a panic.
Through a window of the drawing-room, up at "Norston's Rest," another figure rushed in wild haste. She ran blindly against one of the great marble vases on the terrace, and shook the sweet masses of dew-laden foliage till they rained a storm of drops upon her bare arms and soft floating garments.
For a moment Lady Rose, for it was she, leaned against the marble, stunned and bewildered. The shot she had heard in the depths of the park had pierced her heart with a terrible fear.