Well, After All--

by Frank Frankfort Moore

And then, as she stood there, she recalled the most trivial incidents of the morning after the murder of Dick Westwood. She remembered how late it was when Cyril had appeared—how he had made excuse after excuse for remaining in bed. In every trivial act of his she perceived such evidence of his guilt that she was amazed that no one had attached suspicion to him. Why, even the fact of his having so eagerly accepted the offer of an appointment on a sheep station in Australia should have made her suspect that he had the gravest of reasons for wishing to get away from the country. She now saw that his anxiety was to leave the scene of his crime behind him.

Then she thought of the days that preceded his escape—that was how she had come to regard his sailing for Australia—how terrible her trouble had been with him. She had felt that he was going to destruction, idling about the tap-rooms of Bracken-hurst, walking with the most disreputable men to be found in the neighbourhood—utterly regardless of appearances and impatient at her remonstrances. Thinking of all this in the light of the confession which she had just read, she was left to wonder how it was possible that she had failed—that every one in Brackenhurst had failed—to attach suspicion to him.

“He did it—he did it!” she whispered.

Once again with a flicker of hope that was more dispiriting than despair, she read the letter, and with a cry of agony fell back upon the sofa and laid her head, face downward, upon one of its arms. Claude Westwood had uttered his curse against the murderer of his brother and against all that pertained to him! She had been horrified at the thought of Clare; but the curse had fallen, and she, Agnes, was crushed beneath it. Her brother was on his way home to pay the penalty of his crime, and Clare—

She got upon her feet, and stood with one hand grasping the back of the sofa, as the thought flashed through her mind: Clare would be happy. There was now no reason why she and Claude might not marry. Even at that moment, when the horror that had rested on Clare's head had been shifted to her own, Agnes felt a thrill of satisfaction when she reflected that it was in her power to give Clare happiness.

She took a step to the bell-rope, but while it was still in her hand, a thought suddenly flashed through her mind: the story which the postman had been telling to the gardener and the maidservant—to what did it refer?—to whom did it refer?

Some one had been shot during the night—so much she had gathered from the rambling discourse of the man; she had not given much attention to all that he had said, but she recollected that it had struck her as singular that the incidents of the matter to which his story referred closely resembled those of the murder of Dick Westwood: the man might have been describing the latter. The victim had, she gathered, been shot in the back, and—what had the man said?—he had been shot in his own grounds. Some one had been shot in his own grounds? Who—who—who?

Why, who could it be but Sir Percival Hope? It could be no one but Sir Percival Hope—the man whom she loved.

That was the terrible thought that swooped down upon her, so to speak—that hawklike thought that struck its talons through her; and at that moment such doubts as might have lingered in her heart were swept away. She now knew that she loved Sir Percival Hope, who was lying at the point of death, if the man who had come with the story had spoken the truth.

“Thank Heaven—thank Heaven that he knew the truth before he died; thank Heaven that he knew I loved him; and thank Heaven that he died before he could know that other truth—that we could never be anything more to each other than we were. I should have had to tell him that—all that that letter has told to me. But I have still to tell some one of it. Who is it—who is it?”