“What is the matter?”
“Man shot, I believe, sir.”
Annie kept quite still, quite calm, while George induced the policeman to let them pass in; and, as soon as the door was opened, she slipped past her brother-in-law, who had not known she was so close, and flew first up the stairs, swiftly and silently as a bird.
“He has broken his word to me,” she thought in agony. “He has scattered all our happiness; and now——Oh, where is he? I dare not go in! Perhaps already they have led him away to—prison. Oh, Harry, Harry!”
She was standing outside the door of the sitting-room, which was shut. She seemed to hear a noise of low voices: but she was not sure that it was not the singing in her own ears. At last, with cold, weak fingers, she turned the handle and went in.
The only figure in the room was that of the cripple, lying motionless on the sofa.
Brought thus abruptly into what she believed to be the presence of a dead man, Annie tottered to the table for support, her face white and damp with horror; but Stephen turned, raised his head and confronted her; and she gave a low cry of relief when she saw that he was alive.
“Then Harry has not hurt you?” she whispered falteringly.
“No,” said the cripple, “it was not he. You will never forgive me, Annie; you will hate me. I shot him!”
Annie did not cry this time, did not even start; she stood tapping with her fingers upon the table, struck suddenly into utter numbness. She did not feel his trembling hands clinging to her mantle as he fell at her feet and implored her to speak to him, to scold him, and not to stand before him as if his words had killed her. She did not hear the door of the bedroom open or feel the touch of a stranger’s hand. But the new-comer was a doctor; and, when she woke presently from the sort of stupor which had seized her, he said, quietly: