Elizabeth's injury was slight. When she recovered from the shock and the faintness, she declared that there was no wound at all—that the ball had merely grazed her, and the report of the pistol and her fatigue had done the rest.
"You always seem to be round sort of handy when we want anything," remarked Nancy to Archdale as she looked up from wiping the few drops of blood from Elizabeth's ear.
"Half an inch to the left," said Stephen hastily, as he stood watching her, "and—"
"Yes," she answered, "and then—." She looked up, seeing him indistinctly in the flaring light of the candle. But in her mind there was a fair woman standing beside him. But for Elizabeth's idle words this vision would have been a reality instead of a a hopeless dream. She felt the pain of this so keenly now that it seemed to her it would have been a good thing if the ball had swerved half an inch to the left. Then her father, who had been found on his way back, came in hastily, and as Elizabeth glanced at his face she knew that life ought to be dear to her.
"Elizabeth," he said, as Archdale left them, "have you not had enough of it yet? Come home now. You have already done a great work."
The girl raised herself slowly, for she still felt a touch of faintness.
"Yes, father, I will go home at once," she answered, "if you will tell me that it is the sort of thing that you have been trying all my life to teach me to do."
After Mr. Royal had left her, and Nancy was asleep, Elizabeth lay a long time thinking. She perceived now the whole truth about Edmonson. She was in a coil of struggle, and perhaps of crime. It seemed as if she herself must be guilty, as all the consequences of what she had supposed the jest of a summer evening rose before her.
Yet, for all this imagining, there was in her heart the comfort of innocence.
In the morning the shadow of danger seemed to shrink away in the sunlight, and Elizabeth went back to her duties with a spirit firm, if not untroubled. She saw nothing to give her fresh alarm. She found that Edmonson had excused his act to the spectators as a touch of delirium accompanying fever, and the next day he had fever beyond question, though not enough to be very dangerous.