"Quarter-past eleven!" calls Sir Harry; and the gay cavalcade moves off, and Hyacinthe, waving adieu to Lady Dering, watches it fade away among the windings of the avenue.
"Mr. Chandoce has a green mount," mutters one of the footmen to another.
"Yes, he have, but he's not a green horseman."
"No," admits the other.
Hyacinthe remembers their talk later in the day—that day that she passes in such a restless wandering from one room to another—from the conservatory to the library, and from music-room to hall. Finally, at four o'clock she has composed herself with a book in the library, and before the fire sits half lost in reading, half in wondering. Without, the early gloom of the short day is gathering, and the bare trees cast murk shadows all across the frostbitten lawns, and late birds twitter their good-night notes, and a few sleepy rooks caw coldly to each other.
She hears none of this, is as self-absorbed a being as ever lived—one whose whole solitude is full to overflowing with the thought of another. But at last there breaks in upon Hyacinthe's still dream a shriek, and then wild tumult, noises and excited speech, and the girl springs to her feet, and in a flash is out in the wide hall in the very midst of it all.
He lies there quite, quite dead. For ever flown the breath that made of this beautiful clay a living man. Lady Florence has him halfway in her arms as she kneels on the floor beside the body of her lover, and between her sobs cries out to them to "Go for the surgeons!" for whom long since Sir Harry sent. Hyacinthe put her hands behind her and leaned heavily against the column that by good chance she found there. When the crowd parted from him a little she leaned over a bit and stared: that was all.
"Do not you touch him!" cried the English maiden, maddened by her grief, as she glanced up at the fair face.
"No, I will not: I do not wish to," returns the other softly, straightening herself; and leaning there in her close gown, she is as tearless as some caryatid.
When the surgeons have come on their useless mission, and gone, when Florence Ffolliott stands weeping and wringing her hands, Hyacinthe ventures over a pace nearer to the two.