Danton came to an abrupt stop, and there were tears in his eyes as he turned and faced the detective.
“You mustn’t talk to me like that, old chap, don’t you know,” he said. “I’ve been up against it awful hard since I found that dead body in the chair in my room, and I can tell you right now that ‘Little Reggie’s wild-oats’ days are over, and that’s no dream.”
“Good for you. I believe you are in earnest.”
“In earnest? So much so that if you had told me just now that there was a possibility that I might, even unconsciously, be the murderer, I should have gone directly and given myself up and faced the music. Thank Heaven, it is not necessary.”
They were ascending the long pathway which led to the side entrance of the house, and as Danton ceased speaking he raised his arm and pointed across the lawn.
Nick turned, and his eyes encountered a vision of beauty such as never before in his life had he encountered, and the memory of which remained with him to the end of his life.
It was the month of June, it will be remembered, and a great part of the garden was given up to the cultivation of roses. There were thousands of them in bloom, from the purest white to the deep and haughty red of the jacqueminot, and they clung to low bushes and to high ones. They climbed upon trellises and peeped from interstices in the lattice work built by the gardener to support them. They hung in clusters far out of reach overhead, and they smiled up from the dew-laden leaves and grasses in the beds. Roses in all their richness, in all the magnificent and munificent glory of strength, and color and grace. Roses! Roses everywhere. And in the very midst of them, framed in nature’s richest and most priceless work, dressed in a simple white morning gown with the glory of her hair glistening in the slanting sun, with her eyes sparkling irridescently and her lips parted in a smile, and with festoons of roses hanging from her shoulders and arms, encircling her neck and filling her hands, stood Mercedes, looking toward her brother and his companion.
Involuntarily Nick Carter raised his hat and bowed—to the matchless beauty of the scene more than to the young woman who completed it. And then he was conscious of a shiver that went through him like an electric shock when he suddenly remembered the cold and silent clod of clay that was sitting so still in a chair somewhere in the house before him, whose dead eyes would never look upon this scene, whose senseless nostrils could never again expand to meet the fragrance of that June morning—that useless body which only yesterday had been as filled with hopes and longings as any person alive.
“It is your sister, is it not?” said Nick in a low tone to Danton.
“Yes.”