mean by forgetting your gun?” 

 “I mean, sir,”—he looked down; his features still twitched spasmodically, “I mean—it was like this. I was no good at the shoot, and I left it and came back by myself—came back by the Bishop’s Walk. Just a little way inside, I stopped to light a cigarette, and rested my gun against a tree and forgot it; but an hour later I remembered that I had left it there, and went back to fetch it, and saw—O, it was ghastly!” 

 “Steady, man! Was the girl there when you first entered the path?” 

 Le Sage listened for an answer in the affirmative, and could hardly hear it when it came. 

 “And you stopped to light a cigarette?” The father looked keenly into the son’s face. “You haven’t yet told us what girl, Hughie.” 

 The good liqueur was working. The young fellow lifted his head, a new passionate expression in his eyes:— 

 “It was Annie, sir—that good-looking housemaid. You wouldn’t wonder over my horror if you saw. He must have fired at short range, the damned villain, and when she was turned from him. There is a hole in her back that one could put—ah, I can’t tell you!” 

 M. le Baron exclaimed, “That would have been,” said he, speaking for the first time, “between three and four, when you discovered the body?” 

 “Just now,” answered Hugh, addressing his father. “I have come straight from it. They are waiting for you, sir, to know what to do.” 

 “It was done with your gun? Is that the assumption?” suggested the Baron. 

 “I don’t know,” replied the young man feverishly, again not to the questioner. “I suppose so; I dare say. Both barrels are discharged, and one I am pretty sure I left loaded. Are you coming, sir?” 

 Sir Calvin, frowning a stiff moment, moved to acquiesce. They all went out together. At the entrance to the track a group of frightened maid-servants stood white-lipped and whispering, afraid to penetrate farther. One or two grooms and a couple of gardeners had already gone in, and were awaiting about the body the arrival of their master. It lay, face downwards, close beside the beech trunk behind which the living girl had sought to hide herself from Le Sage. That stood at a point in the winding path some twenty-five yards from the wicket, and was nowhere remotely visible from the road. She might have been making her way back to the house when she was fired on and shattered. It was a 

 Prev. P 38/171 next