in Heaven damn you!" With inarticulate bestial cries
she fell upon the man who had killed Billy, and her violet fripperies
fluttered, her impotent little hands beat at him, tore at him. She was
fearless, shameless, insane. She only knew that Billy was dead.

With an oath the man flung her from him and turned on his heel. She
fell to coaxing the heap in the grass to tell her that he forgave
her--to open his eyes--to stop bloodying her dress--to come to
luncheon...

A fly settled on Billy's face and came in his zig-zag course to the
red stream trickling from his nostrils, and stopped short. She brushed
the carrion thing away, but it crawled back drunkenly. She touched it
with her finger, and the fly would not move. On a sudden, every nerve
in her body began to shake and jerk like a flag snapping in the wind.

XXVI

Some ten minutes afterward, as the members of the house-party sat
chatting on the terrace before Selwoode, there came among them a mad
woman in violet trappings that were splotched with blood.

"Did you know that Billy was dead?" she queried, smilingly. "Oh, yes,
a man killed Billy just now. Wasn't it too bad? Billy was such a nice
boy, you know. I--I think it's very sad. I think it's the saddest
thing I ever knew of in my life."

Kathleen Saumarez was the first to reach her. But she drew back
quickly.

"No, ah, no!" she said, with a little shudder. "You didn't love Billy.
He loved you, and you didn't love him. Oh, Kathleen, Kathleen, how
_could_ you help loving Billy? He was such a nice boy. I--I'm rather
sorry he's dead."

Then she stood silent, picking at her dress thoughtfully and still
smiling. Afterward, for the first and only time in history, Miss
Hugonin fainted--fainted with an anxious smile.

Petheridge Jukesbury caught her as she fell, and began to blubber like
a whipped schoolboy as he stood there holding her in his arms.

XXVII

But Billy was not dead. There was still a feeble, jerky fluttering in
his big chest when Colonel Hugonin found him. His heart still moved,
but under the Colonel's hand its stirrings were vague and aimless as
those of a captive butterfly.

The Colonel had seen dead men and dying men before this; and as he
bent over the boy he loved he gave a convulsive sob, and afterward
buried his face in his hands.

Then--of all unlikely persons in the world--it was Petheridge
Jukesbury who rose to meet the occasion.

His suavity and blandness forgotten in the pr