"Oh, well, if she gets better, of course...."
Danilo leaned forward. "Better?... Oh no, my friend, she is dead, quite dead. He aimed at her mouth.... I saw her fall.... But the man will not swing. He is not that kind. He will shoot himself first."
"It is all the same," returned the barkeeper. "He was a fool!"
"You do not know what you are talking about!" Danilo cried, hotly.
"Neither do you!" said the other, with an indulgent laugh.
Danilo gulped the whisky in silence and went out with a morose air.
"A fool?... A fool?..." he kept repeating.
The issue was at once irritating and impersonal. He felt as if the barkeeper had affronted the whole masculine sex. A man was a fool for allowing himself to be taken in, he was quite ready to grant that. But no man was a fool for collecting the full toll of feminine duplicity. Now this man, in the dressing-room of the St. Francis Hotel, who had shot down a woman....
Danilo halted. Why, the man was he—himself! Somehow it had never occurred to him. He had the same feeling that comes in dreams, when one is in some mysterious way both the actor and the audience. He had been in the picture and out of it. It was all very puzzling.
He tried to review the incidents of the evening. Nothing was very clear. The sound of a pistol-shot was the most vivid memory; then somebody had fallen.... The woman was dead—it could not be otherwise! Why had he walked away so calmly? He should have stayed. After all, he was a physician and he had acted unprofessionally. It was a physician's place to remain and serve, even in the face of utter hopelessness. Well, he had come away and it was too late to turn back. He was very tired. He looked about him. He had drifted down to the water-front.