He lay at our feet, lifeless, Barnaby standing over him with a broken sword in his hand.
For a while no one spoke or moved. But the woman called Deb gasped and panted and even laughed, as one who is well pleased because she hath had her revenge.
Then Madam herself, clad in a long white night-dress and with bare feet, suddenly pushed us aside and fell upon her knees beside the wounded man.
She lifted his head. The face was pale and the eyes closed. She laid it gently down and looked round.
'You have killed him,' she said, speaking not in a rage or passion, but quietly. 'You have killed him. To-morrow you will hang! you will all hang!'
We said nothing.
'Doctor,' she turned to me, 'tell me if he is dead or living.'
She snatched the lanthorn and held it while I made such examination as was possible. I opened his waistcoat and laid back his shirt. The sword had run straight through him and broken off short, perhaps by contact with his ribs. The broken point remained in the wound and the flesh had closed around it, so that, save for a drop of blood or two oozing out, there was no flow.
It needs no great knowledge to understand that when a man hath six inches of steel in his body which cannot be pulled out, and when he is bleeding inwardly, he must die.
Still, as physicians use, I did not tell her so.