"At my instigation?—confound it, Christabel—you have no right to say such things. I told him it was a good place for woodcock—and it pleased his fancy to try his luck there before he left. Lonely place, be hanged. It is a place to which every tourist goes—it is as well known as the road to this house."
"Yet he was lying there for hours and no one knew. If Nicholls had not gone he might be lying there still. He may have lain there wounded—his life-blood ebbing away—dying by inches—without help—without a creature to succour or comfort him. It was a cruel place—a place where no help could come."
"Fortune of war," answered Leonard, with a careless shrug. "A sportsman must die where his shot finds him. There's many a day I might have fallen in the Rockies, and lain there for the lynxes and the polecats to pick my bones; and I have walked shoulder to shoulder with death on mountain passes, when every step on the crumbling track might send me sliding down to the bottomless pit below. As for poor Hamleigh; well, as you say yourself, he was a doomed man—a little sooner or later could not make much difference."
"Perhaps not," said Christabel, gloomily, going slowly to the door; "but I want to know how he died."
"Let us hope the coroner's inquest will make your mind easy on that point," retorted her husband as she left the room.
CHAPTER II.
"YOURS ON MONDAY, GOD'S TO-DAY."
The warning gong sounded at half-past seven as usual, and at eight the butler announced dinner. Captain Vandeleur and Mr. Montagu had returned from Bodmin, and they were grouped in front of the fire talking in undertones with Mr. Tregonell, while Christabel and the younger Miss Vandeleur sat on a sofa, silent, after a few murmured expressions of grief on the part of the latter lady.
"It is like a dream," sighed Mopsy, this being the one remark which a young person of her calibre inevitably makes upon such an occasion. "It is like a dreadful dream—playing billiards last night, and now—dead! It is too awful."