As she climbed painfully to her feet, grasping with tremulous fingers a chair at her side, she saw Amos turn about, and with wavering steps, approach the column between the windows where, in the full light of the moon, hung a little calendar, and on it
Nov.
4
He uttered no sound, but his head drooped and he staggered back. Reeling against a low divan he fell his length upon it, and lay with upturned face, motionless as the two men upon the floor.
“The end has come, my Moll”
Molly hastened to his side and bent over him with an anxious question. In the full rays of the moon her head and neck with the white dress were almost luminous against the dim recesses of the room behind; and his eyes rested with a dazed, half-frightened look on the diamond crescent, then fell to her face, and up again to the jewels in her hair. With an effort he laid a hand upon her shoulder and answered, with a feeble smile, “The end has come, my Moll.”
“No, no. Don’t say that! I’ll send for the doctor and have him here at once!”
But the hand restrained her. “It’s of no use. The ball went here, through the chest.”
“But, darling, your life may depend upon it! You don’t know.”
“Yes—I do know. My own death, with you bending over me in the moonlight—in this room—I saw before we ever met. The same vision again—when you stood before me in the conservatory, was what—startled me—that night, a year ago.”