What was he saying in reply?
". . . You will learn your lesson all right, dear, and suffer a bit, dear, but you will come to me in the end."
She suddenly knelt and plunged her hand down into the water, breaking the smooth surface into a thousand miniature waves which turned, as she stared, into the mocking smiles of her acquaintances and friends; and she knelt quite still until the surface was once more smooth, out of which, as she stared, looked the tragic face of the dead man's mother and the grief-stricken, shamed face of her beloved godmother.
The gossip, the scandal, with her name linked as lover to that dead man; the chuckles, the sly lifting of eyebrow and pursing of lips when it should be known that the other man, the dead man's greatest friend, had come upon them unawares, alone in the tent at night?
The story of this struggle, the shooting of the treacherous friend—for who would believe the story, told by the principals in the drama, of a wounded lion which had turned and disappeared into the night?
There would be the inquest, the inquiry, the arrest for murder and the trial, in which she and all those she loved would be pilloried, through her fault, in the eyes of the world.
She stared down at the water, which seemed to hold her hands in the icy grip of death—her hands—look! what was that?—what had happened to them?
They were spotted with red!
She tore at her handkerchief and rubbed them; under the water, rubbed hard, rubbed frantically, but the red spots were there on her hands, on her handkerchief, on the water—the red she had seen when she had looked . . .
She flung the handkerchief from her and rose to her feet, shaking convulsively from head to foot.