I was silent for a moment. The walls of my little chamber had suddenly opened. I saw again from the edge of the moor that lone figure coming down the hillside towards us, I saw that strange light flashing in my father’s face, and I heard the greeting of the two men. A sick dread was in my heart.
“Was father called as a witness?” I asked.
“No. Why should he be? The man was a stranger to him. He had never seen him before.”
I closed my eyes and laid back. Alice bent over me anxiously.
“I ought not to have talked about this to you,” she said. “Father absolutely forbade me to, but you wanted to know the end so much. Promise not to think of it any more.”
Promise not to think of it any more? Ah! if only I could have made that promise and kept it. My sister’s protesting words seemed charged with the subtlest and most bitter of all irony. Already some faint premonition of the burden which I was to bear seemed dawning upon me. I remained silent and kept my eyes closed. Alice thought that I was asleep, but I knew that sleep was very far off. The white, distorted face of that dying man was before me. I saw the silent challenge and the silent duel which had passed between those two, the central figures in that marvellous little drama—one, the challenger, ghastly pale even to the tremulous lips, wild and dishevelled, my father looking down upon him with unquailing mien and proud, still face. One moment more of life, a few beats more of the pulses, and that sentence—and that sentence—what would it have grown to? I felt myself shivering as I lay there.
“Did you say that father was away now?” I asked Alice.
She nodded.
“Yes; he is staying with the Bishop for a few days. I should not be surprised if he came home to-day, though. I have written to him by every post to let him know how you are, and he was most anxious to hear directly you were well enough to talk. I have been disobeying him frightfully.”
Again I closed my eyes and feigned sleep. I had heard what Alice had not, the sound of wheels below. Suddenly she laid down her work and started up. It was my father’s voice bidding the cabman “Good night.”