"What is the matter?"
Marcia sat up in bed. Was her mother ill?—dead?
The girl stammered out her ghastly news. Briggs the head gardener had just brought it. The head foreman at Redcross Farm going his rounds in the early hours, had perceived a light burning in the laboratory. The door was locked, but on forcing his way in, he had come suddenly on a spectacle of horror. John Betts was sitting—dead—in his chair, with a bullet wound in the temple; Mrs. Betts was on a stool beside him, leaning against his knee. She must have found him dead, have taken up the revolver, as it had dropped from his hand, and after an interval, long or short, have deliberately unfastened her dress—The bullet had passed through her heart, and death had been a matter of seconds. On the table was lying a scrap of paper on which were the words in John Betts's handwriting: "Mad—forgive." And beside it a little twisted note, addressed to "Miss Marcia Coryston." The foreman had given it to Briggs. Her maid placed it in Marcia's hands.
She tried to read it, but failed. The girl beside her saw her slip back, fainting, on her pillows.
CHAPTER XV
It was the old housekeeper at Coryston, one Mrs. Drew, who had been the presiding spirit of the house in all its domestic aspects for some thirty years, who came at the summons of Marcia's frightened maid, and helped the girl to revive her mistress, without alarming Lady Coryston. And before the news could reach her mother in other ways, Marcia herself went in to tell her what she must know.
Lady Coryston had had a bad night, and was sitting up in bed gazing straight before her, her gaunt hands lying listlessly on a pile of letters she had not yet opened. When Marcia came in, a white ghost, still shivering under nervous shock, her mother looked at her in sudden dismay. She sprang forward in bed.
"What!—Marcia!—have you seen Arthur?"
Marcia shook her head.