"Mr. Forel has just sent it down, sir," he said. "You're Mr.
Deringham?"
Deringham tore the envelope open, and while he sat staring at the paper inside it his daughter noticed that there was a little pale spot in his cheek. His hand also appeared to tremble slightly when, saying nothing, he passed the telegram across to her.
"Regret to inform you that my partner met with accident in the ranges, and his condition is critical," it read. "Can you send us nurse or capable woman? Mrs. Margery ill. Seaforth, Somasco."
Alice Deringham shivered a little. "He is evidently dangerously injured."
"It appears so," said Deringham, and his daughter afterwards remembered that his voice was hoarse and strained.
The girl, however, said nothing for a while. She was not impulsive, and her face remained almost as cold in its clear whiteness as the panelling behind it, but her heart beat a little faster than usual, and she was trying somewhat unsuccessfully to analyze her sensations. In the meanwhile the voices of the men who now surrounded the one with the paper reached her, and she noticed vacantly that her father seemed to be listening to them.
"They'll hang him, anyway," said one.
"Made no show at all when they got him hiding in the bush," said another. "Still, you couldn't expect much from that kind of man. Killed him for a hundred dollars in his bed."
"Yes, sir," said the first speaker. "And he didn't get all of them.
The man was his own cousin, and too sick to do anything. Well, thank
God, we haven't got many vermin of that kind in the Dominion."
Deringham, who had picked up the telegram, let it slip from his fingers as he rose, and the girl wondered at the change in him. He seemed to have grown suddenly haggard, and the lines upon his face were much more apparent than usual.