“I can’t,” Elithe gasped, but Clarice insisted and led the way into the room where Jack lay in his coffin ready for the early boat.
On his handsome face there was a look as if death had kindly washed it clean from every mark of dissipation and left upon it the beauty and innocence of childhood. Elithe was crying,—so was Clarice, and Miss Hansford’s eyes were wet with tears. Paul alone was calm.
“Poor Jack. We were always friends until the last, when he was not responsible for what he did,” he said, laying his hand on the forehead of the dead.
“D-don’t,” Miss Hansford stammered, thinking of the old tradition as to what would happen if the slayer touched the corpse of the slain.
Paul had touched Jack, and nothing had happened. The white forehead showed just as white in the lamp light, and around the mouth there was the same smile which had settled there when the dying lips whispered, “Elithe.” The old tradition had not worked. Paul was not afraid of Jack, and he astonished Miss Hansford still more by saying: “Perhaps you know they extracted the bullet.”
She nodded, and he continued: “They have not found the revolver. Strange, too, as it must have fallen near him. I remember the one he used to have. It was very small, and expensive. Some one may have picked it up and is keeping it for its value, or it was trampled into the sand by the many feet which have visited the place from curiosity.”
Miss Hansford was horrified at his coolness and duplicity, while Elithe looked at him with eyes full of pain and surprise. “I saw him; I saw him,” she thought, while her aunt was thinking of the revolver at the bottom of her chest, with “P. R.” upon it. On the piazza, as they were saying good-night, Clarice threw her arms around Elithe’s neck and kissed her, as she said: “I shall never forget what you were to my brother, or your kindness to him. Will you come to the funeral to-morrow morning and sit with us?”
“No,—no. Don’t ask me to do that. There is no reason why I should,” Elithe cried, putting up her hands in deprecation.
Clarice was making altogether too much of her relations with Jack, and once out upon the avenue she almost ran to get away from the house and its atmosphere.
“Oh, auntie,” she said, “it is all so dreadful, and Mr. Ralston does not mean to explain. What shall we do if he is suspected?”