As we neared the Manor, the keeper, far in the lead, vaulted lightly over a stile in a hedgerow. I followed less lightly (my enemies aver that I am growing stout) with Tompkins in the rear.... Suddenly a shot, abnormally loud and harsh in the twilight hush, rang out at my back. Blind and deaf—fatally blind and deaf as I had been—I realized its import on the instant. Even before I turned I knew what I should see.
Tompkins was lying in a huddled heap at the foot of the stile, and as I bent over him I saw that it was a matter of moments. He had bungled things all his life, poor fellow, but he had not bungled this.
"An accident, Sibley," he gasped, as I knelt beside him. "I was—always—awkward—with a gun, you know. An accident—you'll remember, old man? Elinor must not—"
Speech failed him for an instant. An awful agony was upon him, but no moan escaped his lips. His life had been a farce, a failure, but if he had not known how to live, assuredly he knew how to die.... The shadows were closing round him. He put out a groping hand for mine.
"I think I'm—going, Sibley," he whispered. "Tell Elinor—" And with her name upon his lips, he went out into the dark.
[MARGARET S. ANDERSON]
Miss Margaret Steele Anderson, poet and critic, was born at Louisville, Kentucky, in 1875. She was educated in the public schools, with a short special course at Wellesley College. Since 1901 Miss Anderson has been literary editor of The Evening Post, of Louisville, having a half-page of book reviews and literary notes in the Saturday edition. From 1903 to 1908 she was "outside reader" for McClure's Magazine; and since quitting McClure's, she has been a public lecturer upon literature and art in New York, Philadelphia, Pittsburg, Memphis, and Lake Chautauqua. Miss Anderson's fine poems have appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, The Century, McClure's, but the greater number of them have been published in The American Magazine. She has also contributed considerable verse to the minor magazines. The next year will witness Miss Anderson's poems brought together in a charming volume, entitled The Flame in the Wind, which form they very certainly merit. No Kentucky woman of the present time has done better work in verse than has she.
Bibliography. McClure's Magazine (August, 1902); The Century (September, 1904).