“What do you mean?”

“I mean has she been told the truth?”

The girl shook her head.

“No,” she replied; “I am positive that no one has told her. I was with her all the time, up to the very moment that she fell asleep. Yet—”

She hesitated.

“Yes?”

“She knows! Oh, Mr. Knox! to me that is the most horrible thing of all: that she knows, that she must have known all along—that the mere sound of the shot told her everything!”

“You realize, now,” I said, quietly, “that she had anticipated the end?”

“Yes, yes. This was the meaning of the sorrow which I had seen so often in her eyes, the meaning of so much that puzzled me in her words, the explanation of lots of little things which have made me wonder in the past.”

I was silent for a while, then: