Mrs. Balfame drew herself still higher and stood quite rigid for a moment; then the coroner, one of her husband's friends, came up the path and said in a low tone to Gifning, "Take her upstairs. We're goin' to bring him in. He's gone, for a fact."
Mr. Gifning pushed her gently along the path, as the others lifted the limp body and tramped slowly behind. "You go up and have a good cry," he said. "I'll 'phone for the Cummacks. I guess it was bound to come. There's been hot times in Dobton lately—"
"Do you mean that he was deliberately murdered?"
"Looks like it, seeing that he didn't do it himself. The damned hound was skulking in the grove. Of course he's made off, but we'll get him all right."
Mrs. Balfame walked slowly up the stair, her head bowed, while the heavy inert mass so lately abhorrent to his wife and several politicians was laid on the sofa in the parlour whose evolutions had annoyed him.
Mr. Gifning telephoned to the dead man's brother-in-law, then for the police and the undertaker.
Mrs. Balfame sat down and awaited the inevitable bombardment of her privacy by her more intimate friends. Already shriller voices were mingling with the heavier tones down on the lawn and out in the avenue. The news seemed to have been flashed from one end of Elsinore to the other.