His wavering gaze traveled on and downward. Then it fastened upon something which lay at his feet, and slowly his face stiffened and grew leaden.
It was Leila, huddled and still, with one side of her forehead blotted out in a crushed, oozing mass of crimson.
The driver dropped with a soft thud from his relaxed hand, and he knelt, lifting the limp body which sagged so horribly, with such unexpected weight. Shaking as he was, he managed to raise it to a half sitting posture, the shoulders supported against his knee; but as, mechanically, he whispered her name, the head rolled back, its jaw hanging grotesquely; and from between the half-crossed lids her eyes stared dully back at him in a cold, fixed, basilisk gaze.
As confirmation came to him, the body slipped from his nerveless grasp and with a soft, silken rustle rolled over and fell face downward, settling into the hearth rug with the dishevelled golden head against the fender.
He had killed her! He meant to do it, of course; he had been conscious of that resolve before she defied him, while she had stood there vainly striving to maintain her attitude of injured innocence; but now he realized that it must have been his unacknowledged intention from the moment suspicion changed to conviction. The stupendous fact, however, and the consequences which it portended, held him suddenly at bay.
He had committed murder, and he would be called upon to pay the penalty! It was not death he feared———how easily it had been meted out, there in that little room!—but the dragging, infernal machinery of legalizing his punishment; the trial, the publicity, the hideous disgrace, the sordidness of the whole wretched proceeding!
No tinge of grief or remorse colored his thoughts. She had wronged him, had richly deserved what had come to her. That dead thing lying there had become simply a menace to his own life, and the immediate future in all its horrors ranged before his mental vision. The discovery, the arrest, the stark headlines in the papers——Wall Street, the Trust Company, the clubs, all his world ringing with it! Then the legal battle, long drawn out, the sentence, the weeks of tortured waiting in an ignominious cell and at last the end, hideous, inevitable!
How life-like she looked, lying there, lying there with no hint of the tell-tale wound visible! She might almost have fainted and slipped from that huge armchair behind her with her head against the fender . . . .
Why could she not have fallen so to-night? The thought seared across his brain like a flash of lightning, and Storm drew his breath in sharply. He was safe, so far! No one knew of what had taken place in that room; no one knew yet that he had even returned to the house. Brewster had not seen him, and Brewster was the only living person who could suspect a motive for the crime.
A motive? But what was he thinking? There would be no question of motive, for there would be no suggestion of crime. Since childhood Leila had been a victim of petit mal, that mild form of catalepsy which, while it baffles cure, yet is in itself not harmful; a moment of faintness, of unconsciousness followed by slight weakness, that was all. Everyone knew of these attacks of hers; George Holworthy had referred to that tendency only last night when she had complained of feeling not quite herself. The chance that she might injure herself in falling when the fainting spell came was the sole danger attached to her old malady. That danger was what must seem to have overtaken her to-night!