“Oh! Jack will take it, thank you.”
As she gave Jacquelin the letter she glanced up in his face inquiringly. But Jacquelin’s eyes avoided hers. He took the letter and stalked out. How he hated Middleton! And how he hated himself for doing it!
He strode down the road full of bitterness, weaving himself a nettle-web that stung him at every step. The moon was just rising above the tree-tops, and its silvery beams were struggling with the last light from the slowly fading west; but Jacquelin was all in darkness. All his plans had come to naught, overthrown by this smiling outsider. He groaned in his helpless anguish. Had he not waited; tried to keep his ideals ever before him; served faithfully; never for a moment faltered or turned aside for anyone else! And what had it availed him! Here was a lifetime of devotion flung away for the facile addresses of this interloper.
At a point in the road, he caught, for a second, just on top of a hill some distance before him, the outline of a man’s figure clear against the sky in the cleft between the trees. It moved with a curious dip or limp that reminded him for a moment of Moses the trick-doctor. The next second the figure disappeared. When Jacquelin reached the spot, he stopped and listened; but there was only silence and a momentary crackle of a piece of bark as some night-animal moved up a tree deep within the shadows. Jacquelin walked on once more, in the dusk of the road and the deeper gloom of his own thoughts. He could not go home, because he had told his aunt he would stay at Dr. Cary’s to tea, and she would wish to know why he had not done so, and when she heard of Middleton would want to hear all about him, and he could not talk of Middleton then. So he wandered on.
When he reached home Miss Thomasia had retired, and he went silently to his room, cursing his fate and Middleton.
Early next morning, Jacquelin was awakened by voices in the yard. Someone was talking to Miss Thomasia. All Jacquelin heard was that Captain Middleton had been shot the night before at the fork of the road that led to Dr. Cary’s. Jacquelin lay still for a second—quite still—and listened. Could it be a dream! The body had been found right at the fork by Dr. Cary as he was going home from seeing Sherrod’s wife, and he had sent for Mr. Jacquelin.
Jacquelin’s heart stopped beating. He sprang from bed and threw open a window. Old Gideon was the speaker.
“What’s that?” asked Jacquelin.
Gideon repeated the story, with further details.