teel until he felt it
sinking through his body, searing him from breast to back.

His arms sank to his sides quite nervelessly. He uttered a faint
exclamation of astonishment, almost instantly interrupted by a cough. He
swayed there a moment, the cough increasing until it choked him. Then,
suddenly limp, he pitched forward upon his face, and lay clawing and
twitching at Sir Terence's feet.

Sir Terence himself, scarcely realising what had taken place, for the
whole thing had happened within the time of a couple of heart-beats,
stood quite still, amazed and awed, in a half-crouching attitude,
looking down at the body of the fallen man. And then from above, ringing
upon the deathly stillness, he caught a sibilant whisper:

"What was that? 'Sh!"

He stepped back softly, and flattened himself instinctively against the
wall; thence profoundly intrigued and vaguely alarmed on several scores
he peered up at the windows of his wife's room whence the sound had
come, whence the sudden light had come which--as he now realised--had
given him the victory in that unequal contest. Looking up at the balcony
in whose shadow he stood concealed, he saw two figures there--his wife's
and another's--and at the same time he caught sight of something
black that dangled from the narrow balcony, and peered more closely to
discover a rope ladder.

He felt his skin roughening, bristling like a dog's; he was conscious
of being cold from head to foot, as if the flow of his blood had been
suddenly arrested; and a sense of sickness overcame him. And then to
turn that horrible doubt of his into still more horrible certainty came
a man's voice, subdued, yet not so subdued but that he recognised it for
Ned Tremayne's.

"There's some one lying there. I can make out the figure."

"Don't go down! For pity's sake, come back. Come back and wait, Ned. If
any one should come and find you we shall be ruined."

Thus hoarsely whispering, vibrating with terror, the voice of his
wife reached O'Moy, to confirm him the unsuspecting blind cuckold that
Samoval had dubbed him to his face, for which Samoval--warning the
guilty pair with his last breath even as he had earlier so mockingly
warned Sir Terence--had coughed up his soul on the turf of that enclosed
garden.

Crouching there for a moment longer, a man bereft of movement and of
reason, stood O'Moy, conscious only of pain, in an agony of mind and
heart that at one and the same time froze his blood and dr