The sight of his white, stricken face was more eloquent than his words. Cecily Hoyle's own colour faded slowly.
“What is it?” she questioned, looking from one to the other. She was a tall, thin slip of a girl with clear brown eyes, a nose that turned up and a mouth that was too wide, a reasonably fair complexion and a quantity of pretty, curly, nut-brown hair that waved all over her head and low down over her ears, and that somehow conveyed the impression of being bobbed when it wasn't. Ordinarily it was a winsome, attractive little face, but just now, catching the fear in Walls's voice, the brown eyes were full of dread and the mobile lips were twitching. “Can't I do anything?” she questioned. “It must be something very sudden. Mr. Bechcombe was quite well when I went out.”
John Walls laid his hand on her shoulder.
“You can't do anything, Miss Hoyle. We can none of us do anything. It is too late.”
Cecily shrank from him with a cry.
“No, no! He can't be—dead!”
A strong hand put both her and John Walls aside.
“Let me pass. I am a doctor. What is the matter here?”
John Walls recognized the speaker as a medical man who had rooms close at hand.
“I think Mr. Bechcombe has had a fit, sir. I am afraid it is all over.”