The last seemed to me the least attractive. I had climbed that hill, and found it led only to a precipice that I had fallen over.
Neither did the first possibility charm me especially. Apart from the horror of it, it was too brief, too sudden, too conclusive. I wanted the gradual, the prolonged.
It was the second course to which my mind turned with the nearest approach to satisfaction. Christian had told me that some of my severest tussles lay ahead; and now I had come to the one in which I should go under. In that the flesh at least would get its hour of compensation, when all was said and done.
At the foot of Mrs. Grace’s steps I paused to recall Christian’s words of a few days previously:
“In love and truth together there’s a power which, if we have the patience to wait for its working out, will solve all difficulties and meet all needs.”
I had tried that—love and truth together!—and at the result I could only laugh.
My immediate fear was lest Mrs. Grace and the Grahams would be on the veranda, vaguely expecting to offer me their congratulations. When half-way up the steps I heard voices and knew that they were there. So be it! I had faced worse things in my life; and now I could face that.
But as I advanced up the lawn I saw them moving about and talking with animation. As soon as Mrs. Grace caught sight of me she hurried down the steps, meeting me as I passed among the flower-beds. She held a newspaper marked Extra in her hand, and seemed to have forgotten that I had love-affairs.
“Have you seen this? Colt, the chauffeur, was at the station and brought it back. It’s just come down from New York.”
Glad of anything that would distract attention from myself, I took the paper in my hand and pretended to be reading it. All I got was the vague information that some one had been assassinated—some man and his morganatic wife. What did it matter to me? What did it matter to any one? Of all that was printed there, only five syllables took possession of my memory—and that because they were meaningless, “Gavrilo Prinzip!”