"He has been murdered!" she said, in hoarse, faint tones. "That suspicion has been in my mind—dark—shapeless—horrible—from the first. He has been murdered! And I am to spend the rest of my life with his murderer!" Then, with a sudden hysterical cry, she turned angrily upon Jessie.
"How dare you tell lies about my husband?" she exclaimed. "Don't you know that nobody came here yesterday except Angus; no one else had the key. The girl at the farm told us so."
"The key!" echoed Jessie, contemptuously. "Do you think a gate, breast high, would keep out an athlete like your husband? Besides, there is another way of getting here, without going near the gate, where he might be seen, perhaps, by some farm labourer in the field. The men were ploughing there yesterday, and heard a shot. They told me that last night at the farm. Wait! wait!" cried Jessie, excitedly.
She rushed away, light as a lapwing, flying across the narrow bridge—bounding from stone to stone—vanishing amidst dark autumn foliage. Christabel heard her steps dying away in the distance. Then there was an interval, of some minutes, during which Christabel, hardly caring to wonder what had become of her companion, stood clinging to the hand-rail, and staring down at stones and shingle, feathery ferns, soddened logs, the water rippling and lapping round all things, crystal clear.
Then, startled by a voice above her head, she looked up, and saw Jessie's light figure just as she dropped herself over the sharp arch of rock, and scrambled through the cleft, hanging on by her hands, finding a foothold in the most perilous places—in danger of instant death.
"My God!" murmured Christabel, with clasped hands, not daring to cry aloud lest she should increase Jessie's peril. "She will be killed."
With a nervous grip, and a muscular strength which no one could have supposed possible in so slender a frame, Jessie Bridgeman made good her descent, and stood on the shelf of slippery rock, below the waterfall, unhurt save for a good many scratches and cuts upon the hands that had clung so fiercely to root and bramble, crag and boulder.
"What I could do your husband could do," she said. "He did it often when he was a boy—you must remember his boasting of it. He did it yesterday. Look at this."
"This" was a ragged narrow shred of heather cloth, with a brick-dust red tinge in its dark warp, which Leonard had much affected this year—"Mr. Tregonell's colour, is it not?" asked Jessie.
"Yes—it is like his coat."