“Leave. This is no place for you.”
“Stay!” cried Regnard violently. “You are to obey my commands, not his.”
Francezka, without looking toward Regnard, without a shudder or a tremor, rose. I had thought she could neither rise nor move nor speak, but there was not the least sign of weakness about her. She actually stopped and curtsied toward Gaston as she went out. He bowed ceremoniously in response.
I took her hand and led her out into the vast hall, dimly lighted. She did not speak my name, but she held on to my hand. In the tempest of her soul she instinctively clung to one whom she knew to be true. She walked with me steadily across the great hall, and into the Diana gallery, now dark and cold as a vault. She looked like a specter as her white figure glided past the mirrors on the walls.
She continued to grasp my hands as a drowning man grasps his savior. We were too far off from the place of combat to hear anything except the dull shuffling of feet upon the floor. I had not the slightest doubt that in five minutes, at most, Regnard would kill Gaston.
In less than five minutes the door of the yellow saloon opened, and a flood of light poured into the great hall, vacant, dark and silent. Regnard appeared on the threshold.
“Come, Madame,” he cried in a loud and triumphant voice. “Come and behold the man you claimed as husband just now!”
Through the open door we could see Gaston, lying huddled in a pool of blood upon the floor of the little room. Blood, too, was on Regnard’s face, but he wiped it off with his handkerchief, and laughed to himself.
I turned to where Francezka had sat, but she was gone. At the end of the hall, I heard the great door clang. At once the thought of the lake suggested itself to me and I ran out of doors. The way Francezka usually took to the lake was by way of the Italian garden. I knew this, but a strange confusion fell upon me when I found myself out of doors, under the blue-black starlit sky. I could not recall the way to the Italian garden—nor yet the lake. At last, it came to me. I saw, afar, through the bare trees, the white statues gleaming, the black cedars, the yew trees—black, too, in the white moonlight.