She shook her head.
“I stay. I mean to see.”
The group of men, with rare delicacy, without a word or a gesture of recognition, clumped out, with heads down and heavy feet, trying in vain to tread lightly.
Jethro and Pamela were alone. She shot forward and touched the sacks.
“You mustn’t touch. I insist on your going in, Pamela.”
But her hand was already on the soiled, wet sacking, and she flipped it down with fearful eagerness.
“I knew, I knew,” she called out almost exultingly. “I felt sure.”
She looked at the dead face for a long time, and very steadily.
“I was driving home from the Flagon House,” Jethro explained in a husky voice and averting his eyes from those dead ones which would not close. “Something went wrong with the harness just as I got to the pond. I jumped down. By the light of the lamps. I saw—his arm was thrust out.”
She didn’t speak. Her eyes were steady and luminous on Edred’s rigid face. There was a ticking sound as the water dropped from his sodden clothes to the floor. Then a quick clatter of a horse’s hoofs fell on their ears.