Once only she looked round and up the hill towards him, and there was a sort of constrained smile about her lips.
"I am afraid she is getting frightened," he thought now.
The intense sultry silence of the place certainly heightened her nervous expectation, for she could distinctly hear her heart thumping against her side. Expectancy became a positive pain—an agony that seemed to be choking her; but never for a moment did she think of abandoning her post.
Meanwhile Will's experienced eye failed to detect the least motion among the bushes, nor could he hear the faintest noise from the dogs. Yet Hermann had told him that this was one of the best beats in the neighbourhood; and so he patiently waited, knowing that it was only a matter of time.
At length one of the dogs was heard to bellow forth his joyous discovery. Will's breath began to come and go more quickly, in his intense anxiety that his pupil should distinguish herself at the approaching crisis. Then it seemed to him that at some distance off he saw one or two of the young firs tremble, when there was not a breath of wind to stir them.
He watched these trees and the bushes adjoining intently, but they were again quite motionless; the dog, too, only barked at intervals. All at once, however, he saw, coming down a lane in the brushwood, two branched yellow tips, which paused and remained stationary, with only a single bush between them and the open space fronting Miss Brunel. They were the horns of a deer which now stood there, uncertain by which way to fly from the dogs behind him.
"If she could only catch sight of these horns," he said to himself, "and understand to fire through the bush, she would kill him to a certainty."
Evidently, however, she did not see the horns; perhaps her position prevented her. So, with his own heart beating rapidly now, Will waited for the moment when the dogs would drive the deer out into the clear sunlight, immediately underneath the muzzle of her gun.
A sharp bark from one of the beagles did it. Will saw the light spring of the deer out into the open, and the same glance told him that Annie Brunel had shrunk back with a light cry, and that the gun, balanced for a moment on the edge of the mass of roots, was about to fall on the ground.
At the same moment he received an astounding blow on the side that nearly knocked him over; and his first instinct was that of an Englishman—to utter an oath, clench his fist, and turn round to find a face to strike at. But before the instinct had shaped itself into either thought or action, the sudden spasm passed into a sort of giddiness; he fancied the pine-tree before him wavered, put out his hand to guard himself, and then fell, with a loud noise in his ears.