The boy was still pressing his hands against his mouth, and pinching his nostrils to keep out his breath. He was growing livid. Dillwyn went to him and tore down his hands. The idiot gasped, and then laughed in that horribly foolish way so distressing in those whose minds are affected.
"Sho! Sho!" cried the poor creature again in heartrending accents. It was as though the mere sight of his father roused all his passions within him. He kept pointing frantically to where Darkham stood, and presently his cry rose into a fierce scream— the scream of a wounded animal.
Dillwyn laid his hand upon his arm and drew him gently away from the opening in the hedge through which his father could be seen. Dillwyn's own face was very pale. For the first time a suspicion that Mrs. Darkham had been foully murdered entered into his brain.
He drew back Edwy with a certain force, and the boy fell to the ground in short but fierce convulsions.
Dillwyn loosened his collar, and soon it was all over. Edwy rose, looked strangely round him, and with a queer twitching of the features rushed past Dillwyn before he could prevent him, and disappeared into the wood.
"Poor fellow!" said Dillwyn sadly.
Agatha struggled with herself, and then burst into tears.
"My darling! What is it? Agatha!" The hideous thought that had come to himself he would not have revealed to her for all the world, and now a fear that she, too, had entertained it horrified him. He held her to him, her head pressed against his breast.
"Oh, I knew it! I knew it all through: I felt it," sobbed she violently. Words of Darkham's that day in the wood came back to her. 'For the sake of the heaven I have lost!' How had he lost it? "Jack, he killed her! He murdered her!"
"Agatha, my beloved! Why have such a thought as that? You must remember that that poor boy—-"