For a second there was silence, and the blue smoke from the gun hung heavily upon the damp autumn air. In the midst of it stood Belle Quest like one transfixed, her lips apart, her blue eyes opened wide, and the stamp of terror—or was it guilt?—upon her pallid face.
All this he saw in a flash, and then ran to the bleeding heap upon the gravel.
He reached it almost simultaneously with Mr. Quest, and together they turned the body over. But still Belle stood there enveloped in the heavy smoke.
Presently, however, her trance left her and she ran up, flung herself upon her knees, and looked at her former lover, whose face and head were now a mass of blood.
“He is dead,” she wailed; “he is dead, and I have killed him! Oh, Edward! Edward!”
Mr. Quest turned on her savagely; so savagely that one might almost have thought he feared lest in her agony she should say something further.
“Stop that,” he said, seizing her arm, “and go for the doctor, for if he is not dead he will soon bleed to death.”
With an effort she rose, put her hand to her forehead, and then ran like the wind down the garden and through the little door.
CHAPTER XXX.
HAROLD TAKES THE NEWS
Mr. Quest and Harold bore the bleeding man—whether he was senseless or dead they knew not—into the house and laid him on the sofa. Then, having despatched a servant to seek a second doctor in case the one already gone for was out, they set to work to cut the clothes from his neck and arm, and do what they could, and that was little enough, towards staunching the bleeding. It soon, however, became evident that Cossey had only got the outside portion of the charge of No. 7 that is to say, he had been struck by about a hundred pellets of the three or four hundred which would go to the ordinary ounce and an eighth. Had he received the whole charge he must, at that distance, have been instantly killed. As it was, the point of the shoulder was riddled, and so to a somewhat smaller extent was the back of his neck and the region of the right ear. One or two outside pellets had also struck the head higher up, and the skin and muscles along the back were torn by the passage of shot.