From without the window I looked back into the room. She stood with outstretched hands—hands that reached upward from the pit of torment, my fancy told me—and pleaded for a little love. “In all this world is there no little ray of love for me?”—it was so my imagination rather than my hearing translated the slight movement of her lips. And while she and the man called Charles stood thus at gaze with one another, the servant spoke again from the stairway.
“You rang?” he asked.
She slowly straightened. She steadied herself. And with her eyes still fixed upon those of Charles she cried:
“Yes, yes, I rang, Jones! Your master is—dead. Your master's murdered! And there, there,” and she stabbed an accusing finger at her erstwhile lover, “there is the man who murdered him!”
And then I turned from the window and ran from that house; and as I ran I saw the Dawn, like a wild, fair woman, walk up the eastern sky with blood-stained feet.
XIII.—Words and Thoughts
[A Play in One Act]
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