But she yielded her hand to him. The shot had indeed pierced the fleshy portion between thumb and forefinger, leaving an ugly gash: the wound was bleeding profusely and already she felt giddy and sick. De Mortémar bound up the little hand with his handkerchief as best he could. She hardly heeded him, beyond that persistent appeal, terrible in its heartrending pathos:
"He'll not die . . . tell me that he'll not die."
Whilst not five paces away, Gaston de Stainville still knelt, praying that the ugly stain of murder should not for ever sully his hand.
CHAPTER XXXVIII
THE HOME IN ENGLAND
The first words which milor uttered when presently consciousness returned were:
"The letter . . . Madonna . . . 'tis destroyed . . . I swear. . . ."
He was then lying in Jean Marie's best bed, between lavender-scented sheets. On his right a tiny open window afforded a glimpse of sea and sky, and of many graceful craft gently lolling on the breast of the waves, but on his left, when anon he turned his eyes that way, there was a picture which of a truth was not of this earth, and vaguely, with the childish and foolish fancy of a sick man who hath gazed on the dark portals, he allowed himself to think that all the old tales of his babyhood, about the first glimpse of paradise after death, must indeed be true.
He was dead and this was paradise.
What he saw was a woman's face, with grave anxious eyes fixed upon him, and a woman's smile which revealed an infinity of love and promised an infinity of happiness.