"Poor fellow, I think he had," Sir Francis said. He held her face turned to him, its pure oval in his hand. "Was it love of you that made him mad, Deleah?"
She was too shy of him yet, and too modest to answer the question by word of mouth; but he knew the answer.
"He won't trouble you any more, Deleah," he said very gently. "He won't hurt me. He is dead."
She would not believe it. It was impossible. "He can't be! He was with me half an hour ago. He was well as I am, and very strong. He can't be dead!"
"He seems to have come to the Brewery-yard—why we shall never know. Perhaps with some mad intention towards me. Perhaps—. But it is all conjecture. All we know is that he is there now. Dead."
"Was he there before me? Did he see me running through the yard—to you?"
"No one knows. No one noticed him till they found him lying behind one of the pillars of the colonnade, shot through the head. I am going back there now. They want me."
He lifted her from the cab and stood beside her till Emily opened the door: "I will be with you again as soon as I can, my darling child," he promised; and got into the cab again and drove away.
Deleah, creeping up the stairs, shut the door of the sitting-room upon Emily, voluble of questions but getting no satisfactory answers. Shaken with emotion, weak and shivering, she stood looking round the empty room, peopling it with its familiar circle. There was Bessie's place, and there Franky's especial chair. There, by the little table on one side of the fire the boarder had sat every evening, book in hand, but eyes wandering ever in Deleah's direction. She spoke, or laughed, or sighed, and the change in his face showed that he listened. Bessie had to call his name sharply twice before his attention was gained. Franky would ask some question about the mixing of his paints. The man would answer with a kind of anxious politeness, getting up to look over the child's shoulder. Passing Deleah, he would stoop for the book he had purposely dropped by her chair. "I love you!" she would hear his fierce low whisper in her ear.
She had been too depreciative of herself, too innocent of the workings of passion, to have felt anything but irritation and annoyance at the signs in him of a suffering she could not believe in or understand. Was it possible, after all, that she, Deleah, whose heart was so tender, whose ways so pitiful, who saved the drowning flies and would not willingly have afflicted the meanest of God's creatures, by means of a pale and pretty face only, had wrought that havoc?