He snuffed out the cigarette with his fingers and put it in his pocket. Then he bent to her, his hand upon her shoulder.
His lips were open to speak, and her silence waited for the words, when like the sudden rending of the heavens there came an awful sound close to them, so close that is shook the windows in their frames and even seemed to shake the earth under their feet.
Sylvia started back with a cry, her hands over her face. "Oh, what—what—what is that?"
Burke was at the window in a second. He wrenched it open, and as he did so there came the shock of a thudding fall. A man's figure, huddled up like an empty sack lay across the threshold. It sank inwards with the opening of the window, and Guy's face white as death, with staring, senseless eyes, lay upturned to the lamplight.
Something jingled on the floor as his inert form collapsed, and a smoking revolver dropped at Burke's feet.
He picked it up sharply, uncocked it and laid it on the table. Then he stooped over the prostrate body. The limbs were twitching spasmodically, but the movement was wholly involuntary. The deathlike face testified to that. And through the grey flannel shirt above the heart a dark stain spread and spread.
"He is dead!" gasped Sylvia at Burke's shoulder.
"No," Burke said.
He opened the shirt with the words and exposed the wound beneath. Sylvia shrank at the sight of the welling blood, but Burke's voice steadied her.
"Get some handkerchiefs and towels," he said, "and make a wad! We must stop this somehow."