“Poor little one, are you hurt? and is that your brother lying there?”
Edna recognized the genuine kindness and sympathy in the voice, and answered:
“Oh, Charlie, Charlie, get him out. He is my husband. We were married this morning.”
A look of surprise and incredulity flitted over Jack’s face; she seemed so young, so like a child, this girl who was married that morning, and whose husband lay dead before him. But he asked her no more questions then, and set himself at once to release the body from the heavy timbers which held it fast. There was a terrible gash across the temple, and the blood was pouring from it so that recognition was impossible until the body was taken to a house near by, and the white, marred face made clean. Then, with a start, Jack exclaimed:
“Oh, Georgie, come quick! It’s Charlie Churchill. Don’t you remember my telling you that I saw some one in the front car who resembled him?”
In an instant Georgie was at his side and bending over the lifeless form of the young man.
“Yes, ’tis Charlie,” she said, “and who is this girl clinging to him and kissing him so?”
Her voice showed plainly that she thought this girl had no right to be “clinging to him and kissing him so,” and her black eyes had in them a look of virtuous indignation as they scrutinized poor Edna, who shrank back a little when Georgie, wholly disbelieving Jack’s answer that she was Charlie’s wife, married the previous day, laid her hand firmly on the girl’s shoulder and demanded sternly:
“Who are you, and what do you know of Mr. Churchill? He is a friend of mine.”
In a kind of frightened, helpless way, Edna lifted up her tearful eyes, and with lips quivering with pain, replied: