"Oh, yes, Mr. Brand, he was lying dead on the grass close by the gate."
"Lying alone?" The voice of the father trembled, in spite of himself, as he asked the question.
"All alone, and he could only have been dead a few moments. He looked so."
"Was there—" and the old lawyer tried to steady his voice as he had many a time before done when asking equally solemn questions concerning the fate of other men's children—"did you see any thing to prove what killed him? He went away from home on horseback—"
"Yes, he was on horseback at Mrs. Hayley's only a little while ago," Elsie mustered strength to interrupt.
"Did you see his horse?—had he fallen from it—or—" and then the voice of the father, who but a few moments before had believed his love for his son crushed out forever, entirely broke down. Heaven only knew the agony of the question he was attempting to put; for the thought had taken possession of him that that son, overwhelmed by the knowledge that he would be pointed out and scoffed as a poltroon, had shown his second lack of courage by laying violent hands on his own life and rushing unbidden into the presence of his Maker!
"No," answered Kitty Hood, setting her teeth hard as she realized that the time had come when she must prove her own honesty at the possible sacrifice of the life of the man who had been her lover. "No, I did not see his horse. He had not been killed by falling from it, I am sure. He had been murdered!"
"Murdered!" Again the word was a double echo from the very dissimilar voices of father and daughter; the latter speaking in the terror of the thought, the former under the conviction that the dreadful truth was being revealed, and that, though the young girl did not suspect the fact, the crime would be found to have been self-murder.
"There was blood on his face and on the grass," poor Kitty went on, "and there was a bundle lying close beside him, that I had seen under the arm of—of—"
"Eh, what? Under whose arm?" asked the father, in a quick voice, as the relation took this new turn.