And the pistol shots crashed through the house.
On the stairs she swayed for an instant, grasped blindly at the rail. Through the floating smoke below the dead man lay there by the latticed window—where they had sat together—he and she——
Spectres were flitting to and fro—grey shapes without faces—things with eyes. A loud voice dinned in her ears, beat savagely upon her shrinking brain:
"You there on the stairs!—do you hear? What are those candles? Signals?"
She looked down at the dead man.
"Yes," she said.
Through the crackling racket of the fusillade, down, down into roaring darkness she fell.
After a few moments her slim hand moved, closed over the dead man's. And moved no more.
In the moat L'Ombre still remained, unstirring; old Anne lay in the kitchen dying; and the Wood of Aulnes was swarming with ghastly shapes which had no faces, only eyes.