“What is it? In my room?” stammered she.
The housekeeper nodded.
“Lady Sarah,” she whispered. “She is—” And with her lips she formed the word “dead.”
Both Sir Robert and Rhoda understood, and in silence they both entered the room, where Mrs. Hawkes turned up the light.
There, under the window, in her light satin dress, with the jewels round her neck and on her hands, the flowers still pinned to her bodice, her beautiful dark hair disordered by her fall, lay Lady Sarah, inert, lifeless.
A little dark stain on her satin bodice showed where the blood had oozed through from the wound in her breast.
Jack Rotherfield burst into the group and threw himself on the ground beside the dead woman. Unprincipled as he was, guilty as he was, not one of the three persons present could fail to be moved by the anguish in his face. Solemn as the moment was, and deeply as they were all impressed by the swiftness of the unexpected and as yet imperfectly understood tragedy, not one of those three, Sir Robert, Rhoda, or Mrs. Hawkes, showed half the despair which convulsed the features of the young man.
He was mad with grief. He babbled out words to which they would all fain have shut their ears; he took the lifeless hands and pressed them within his own, staring down at the dead face, calling to her, now loudly, now softly, in a way which wrung all their hearts.
The group broke up on the arrival of the doctor, and only Mrs. Hawkes and Sir Robert remained in the room while he made his brief examination.
There had never been the least doubt about the result of it. Lady Sarah had been shot through the heart, and must have died instantaneously.