"She trembled and bent and bit her lip till the blood stained her chin. He cursed and prayed and shrieked till the sound, had it come, would have deafened him—but it was all a ghastly mockery! It was as still as a quiet summer afternoon—and the dog and the man waited at the window.
"There was a sound of scraping. Someone was coming up the ladder—someone who whistled softly under his breath, and came nearer every moment. Up, up—the ladder rattled against the window-frame. The man at the window slipped his hand slowly, slowly from the dog's muzzle. The dog stiffened and drew back his black, dripping jaws from his yellow teeth. The man's fingers sunk in the beast's wrinkled neck and he held him back, while he threw one look of hate and triumph at the tortured woman behind him.
"The man bound to the bed couldn't bear it any longer. As a hand grasped the window-sill from outside, he summoned all his iron will, and with a rasping, rending effort that brought a sickly, warm taste to his mouth, he gave a hoarse cry.
"Then the woman leaned over till the sash sunk into her soft flesh, and shrieked with a high, shrill note that cut the air like a knife. But even as she shrieked, a form rose over the sill, there was a rush from inside, and their voices were drowned in a cry of terror, a scream so broken and despairing that Joan could not recognise the voice. And then there was a horrid crashing fall, and the light went out, and something snapped in the brain of the man chained to the bed, and he dropped for miles into a deep, black gulf."
There was a dead silence in the room. No one dared to speak. The stranger's voice had quavered and broken, and in a hoarse whisper he said, rising and stumbling to the door while they made way for him silently:
"And when he knew his friends again, Darby had been buried a long time. Joan did not know whether a broken neck is so much worse than anything else in the world. He hadn't any curiosity about the mill—he didn't care to hear the details of how they burned it to the ground. Perhaps after a while he will be too tired to contradict ignorant people. But he thinks—he has said, that when a man has not slept five hours in a week, nor spoken for days together without agony, much may be forgiven him in the line of intolerance of other people's ignorance—a blessed ignorance gentlemen, a blessed ignorance."
The door closed behind him and the men drew a long breath. No one turned out the gas and it burned till morning, for they took their keys in silence and went upstairs, for the most part arm in arm, haunted by the hoarse, rough voice of the stranger, whom they never saw again.
And indeed they did not care to see him. "For what could one say?" as young Sanford demanded, the next day. "It either happened, or it didn't. If it didn't, he can say no more; if it did, then he is right, and we are in blessed ignorance." And no one of the circle but nodded and looked for a moment at the chair behind the stove.