"Oh!" she said, "you are hurt! There is blood!"
The man was standing in the light; his sleeve, soaked from the wounded horse, was visibly red.
The girl came slowly to another step, her fingers still moving in her hair; her speech fragments.
"They shot you... I heard it... I knew they would.... Are you killed!"
The Duke remembered now this blood on his coat and hurried to explain it.
"I am not hurt," he said. "They killed the horse. I am not in the least hurt."
The girl thrust back her hair with a curious deliberate gesture. Her head moved a little forward. Her bosom lifted. She came down slowly from one step to another. The moment of stress seemed to have matured her face. She was now not unlike the woman whom he had met every night on the turn of the stair.
The Duke saw this, and all that had been illusion, fancy, a state of the mind, emerged into reality. Not on the instant, but in gradual sequence, like one coming in broad day upon events approaching as he had seen them in a dream. It is a moment rare in the experience of life, when the situation dreamed of begins to arrive, in order, in the sun. And especially when these foreseen events appear to demand a decision which one must on the instant hazard. Here was the opportunity, coming in life, which had presented itself so many times to this man in fancy. Then the foreseen march of events, as is usual in life, wholly altered.
The long sheet of glass in the window by the Duke's elbow broke with a sharp sound, shivered to fragments, rattled on the step, and a stone struck the rail of the stairway.
The Duke sprang to the window and looked out. A little group of figures was gathering along the northern border of the court; one, who had come closer to the château, was now running back to them. The Duke turned to find Caroline Childers looking, with him, through the window. He did not stop to explain what she could see; he gave her a brief direction, and vanished up the stairway.