“Killed whom? Then some one is dead?”
“Poor girl!” muttered Craven Black, still staring at the paper with wide eyes, as if he read there an accusation of wilful murder. “Poor Lally—”
“Who?”
Rufus leaped to his feet with a shriek on his lips, bounded to his father’s side, and snatched the paper in his trembling hands.
“I—I see nothing,” he cried. “You shocked me cruelly. I—I thought that Lally— Oh, my God!”
He stood as if suddenly frozen, staring as his father had done at an item in a lower corner of the paper—an item which bore the title: “Distressing Case of Suicide. Another unfortunate gone to her death!”
From the midst of this paragraph the name of Lalla Bird stood out with startling distinctness.
Unconsciously to himself, Rufus Black read the brief paragraph aloud in a hoarse, strained, breathless sort of voice, and his father listened with head bent forward, and with a horrified look graven on his face, as upon stone.
“Last evening,” the notice read, “as officer Rice was pursuing his usual beat, a young woman dashed past him, bonnetless, her hair flying, and ran out upon Waterloo Bridge. She was muttering wildly to herself, and her aspect was that of one beside herself. The officer, comprehending her purpose, rushed after her, but he was too late to arrest her in her dread purpose. She looked back at him, sprang up to the parapet like a flash, and with a last cry upon her lips—a name the officer could not make out—she precipitated herself into the river. In falling, her head struck a passing boat, mutilating her features beyond all semblance of humanity. She was dead when taken from the water, and will have a pauper’s burial unless some one comes forward to claim her remains. No token of her identity was found upon her person, but her handkerchief, floating on the water and picked up immediately by a boatman, bore the name of Lalla Bird. The girl, for she was very young, was pretty, and without doubt belonged to that frail class which more than any other furnishes us suicides.”
Rufus Black read this paragraph to the very end, and then the paper fell from his nerveless hands.