“Yes; it was all dark, but I felt my way till I came to the gilded pillars.”
“Why did you go there?”
“Because I felt—I knew—if he were anywhere in that house he would be there!”
“And why did you stop?”
Her voice rose above its usual quiet pitch in shrill protest:
“You know! you know! I heard a pistol-shot from within, then a fall. I don’t remember anything else. They say I went wandering about town. Perhaps I did; it is all a blank to me—everything is a blank till the policeman said that my sister was dead and I learned for the first time that the shot I had heard in the Moore house was not the signal of his death, but hers. Had I been myself when at that library door,” she added, after a moment of silence, “I would have rushed in at the sound of that shot and have received my sister’s dying breath.”
“Cora!” The cry was from Mr. Jeffrey, and seemed to be quite involuntary. “In the weeks during which we have been kept from speaking together I have turned all these events over in my mind till I longed for any respite, even that of the grave. But in all my thinking I never attributed this motive to your visit here. Will you forgive me?”
There was a new tone in his voice, a tone which no woman could hear without emotion.
“You had other things to think of,” she said, and her lips trembled. Never have I seen on the human face a more beautiful expression than I saw on hers at that moment; nor do I think Mr. Jeffrey had either, for as he marked it his own regard softened almost to tenderness.
The major had no time for sentimentalities. Turning to Mr. Jeffrey, he said: