‘One—two—three!’
Before the last number was uttered, Gavrolles had raised his pistol; but Sutherland, who had watched him keenly, was as quick as he. The weapons were discharged simultaneously, and one sharp report rang out in the air.
Sutherland stood unscathed, though the bullet had almost grazed his brow. Gavrolles, with a stifled scream, threw up his arms, and fell forward on his face—shot through the heart.
CHAPTER XLIV.—‘JANE PEARTREE.’
The stream of my narrative, instead of lingering round that group of excited duellists on the French coast, turns again back to England, and to that place of refuge which the wandering woman, ‘Jane Peartree,’ found in the extremity of her distress.
After her first night under the roof of Mount Eden, and after her first wild impulse to rise and fly on and on, she subsided into a kind of restless slumber, accompanied with violent shivering and nausea, and before twenty-four hours had passed violent fever had set in. Over the details of this illness, which lasted many weeks, I have no intention to linger. We pass on to the period when the invalid, sufficiently convalescent to sit up in the smaller chamber to which she had been conveyed, began thoroughly to realise the fiery ordeal through which her life had passed.
It was a room overlooking the lawn and shrubberies, which, at that season, were carpeted and draped with snow; and she sat one morning, looking out—on the white ground, on the shrouded trees, on the red sun beyond, hanging like a pink balloon close to the cold and foggy marshes, through which flowed the sullen Thames.
By her side stood the French girl Adèle, who, throughout the sickness, had been her voluntary nurse, and had watched her with extraordinary tenderness and care.