Then she directed her footsteps toward where she knew Madame Carmaux was, toward where her ears told her that, below the balcony on which the woman stood, they were making preparations to break into the house. Already, she could hear the hammering and beating on the great door from without; and, so hearing, thought they must be using some tree or sapling wherewith to break it in. She recognised, too, the Commandant's voice, as he gave orders to one of his men to blow the lock off with his carbine.
But without pause, without stopping for one instant, she rushed into the room and out upon the balcony where, seizing Madame Carmaux by the arm, she cried:
"Let them come in. It matters not. Sebastian is dead, or will be dead ere long. I deemed him false to me, as in truth he was. I have sent him to his doom. The Indians have taken him away to drown him, thinking he is that other."
Then from a second woman in that house there arose that night a piercing heartbroken cry, the cry of a woman who has heard the most awful news that could come to her, a cry followed by the words--as, throwing her hands up above her head, she sank slowly down on to the floor of the veranda--
"You have slain him--you have sent him to his doom? Oh, Sebastian! Oh, my son!"
"Yes, your son," said Zara. "Your son."
"It is impossible," they both heard a voice say behind them, the voice of Julian, as now he entered the room with Beatrix. "You are mistaken. Madame Carmaux never had a son, but instead a daughter."
"No," said still another voice, and now it was Mr. Spranger who spoke, all the party from outside having entered the house at last. "No. She never had a daughter, though it suited her purpose well enough to pretend that such was the case, and that that daughter was dead; the birth of her son being thus disguised."
"You hear this," the man in command of the police said, addressing the crouching woman. "Is it true?"
But Madame Carmaux, giving him but one glance from her upturned eyes, uttered no word.