"Dead?" cried Cornelia. "No, indeed."
"No, he isn't dead," Marcus repeated deliberately. His eyelids raised themselves. "He is married; he has half a million," he went on, with the same slowness. His eye lighted up with a malignant glare. "No, he isn't dead. But—"
He stretched himself aloft, and thrust out his arm, and staggered, and only half-saved himself.—"but I will kill him," he added suddenly.
"Marcus!" his sister screamed; "are you mad?"
He lay slantingly against the corner of the summer-house. His arm caught at the crosspieces of the rustic carpentry, and he hung there panting. Presently a little stream of blood began to trickle across the palm of his hand—he had torn himself on a nail. He felt the warm fluid on his skin, and held up his hand to his own curious and impersonal inspection.
"Give me your handkerchief, Cornelia," Abbie implored pitifully. She folded her own and laid Cornelia's over it, and twisted it around his thumb and tied it over his wrist.
His fingers felt thin and claw-like, and there was a grime rubbed into their cracked and roughened skin—those girlish fingers (his mother's fingers) that had once held a pencil so delicately.
"I have seen her—before," he repeated. "Here." He jerked his hand out of his sister's hold and waved it over the circumscribed and shabby landscape. The light shimmered on the leaden surface of the pond behind them, and the wind rustled the stark weeds along its muddy edges. "I knew it was coming." Abbie caught his hand back. "Half a million; he never did anything for me. I will kill him" he muttered faintly.
Cornelia continued her inspection of him. "Abbie, just look at these clothes, will you? And he hasn't got any cuffs on, either."
"Marcus!" his sister called appealingly. Her raised voice indicated that, after all, she must acknowledge him as other than himself. "All that money I sent you—you need it. Go right away to-morrow to your old number and get it." She turned to Cornelia. "I haven't got any; have you? I forgot it, after all."