Her eyes suddenly gleamed like knife points, she trembled with passion, and she plunged her whispered words in up to the hilt.
"So that's the kind of nerve you've got! Oh, my God!... What a damned coward you are!... Well, get out! I don't want you!"
She brushed him wrathfully by, and tensely erect, her free hand clenched, walked out of the room behind the shaft of light.
He stood motionless where she had left him, alone amid the great hush. Her words had pierced to the seat of life. He quivered with the pain—deserved pain, he realised, for it was not a noble part to leave a comrade at such a time. But he had made a mistake in coming, and the only way to correct it was to go. He wished she would go with him, but he knew the result of asking her. She would stab him again, and walk away in contempt.
He sighed, set his lantern on the table, and folded and pocketed the plans of the house. As he laid hold of his lantern to start away he saw on the table, in the lantern's ribbon of light, three or four letters that had evidently been written during the evening and left to be mailed in the morning. He started, sank to a chair, and gazed fixedly at one of the envelopes. The name on it was "Miss Helen Chambers."
Amid all the sensations that swirled within him, his mind instantly made one deduction: Kate Morgan had, after all, secured a place through Helen Chambers, and they were now in the home of one of her friends.
For a minute or more he sat staring at the envelope. It was almost as if Helen herself had surprised him in his guilty presence here. Then, across the darkness of the room, there came the faintest of sounds.
He thought it was Kate. "Is that you?" he whispered.
There was no answer; only dead quiet. In sudden fear he sprang up and directed the lantern's pointer of light toward whence the sound had come. The white spot fell upon the skirt of a dressing-gown. He jerked the pointer upward. The luminous circle enframed the square-jawed, clean-shaven face of a man—of the man he had seen with Helen Chambers—of Mr. Allen.
Instantly the room was filled with a blinding glare, and David saw Mr. Allen standing in the doorway, his left hand still on the electric-light key, his right holding out a revolver.