her well-beloved dying,
maimed and spent, in the fulness of his manhood, her face took on that
ashen pallor again and all relenting left her. There was a satisfaction
of wild justice in the act about to be consummated. And Katherine
raised herself from the pink brocade cushions, and sat erect, her lips
parted in stern excitement, her forehead contracted in the effort to
hear, her eyes fixed on the wide, carven, ebony bed and its embroidered
hangings. The poor Hart had, indeed, ceased to pasture in reposeful
security before the quaint pavilion, set--for its passing
refreshment--in the midst of the Forest of This Life. Now it fled,
desperate, by crooked tangled ways, over rocks, through briars, while
Care, the Leopard, followed hard behind.

First Roger Ormiston's voice reached her in brief direction, and the
trainer's in equally brief reply. The horse neighed again--a sound
strident and virile, the challenge of a creature of perfect muscle, hot
desire, and proud, quick-coursing blood. Afterwards, an instant's
pause, and Chifney's voice again,--"So-ho--my beauty--take it
easy--steady there, steady, good lad," and the slap of his open hand on
the horse's shoulder straightening it carefully into place. While
behind and below all this, in sweet incongruous undertone of
uncontrollable joy, arose the carolling of the blackbirds and thrushes
praising, according to their humble powers, God, life, and love.

Finally, as climax of the drama, the sharp report of a pistol, ringing
out in shattering disturbance of the peace of the fair spring evening,
followed by a dead silence, the birds all scared and dumb--a silence so
dead, that Katherine Calmady held her breath, almost awed by it, while
the hissing and crackling of the little flames upon the hearth seemed
to obtrude as an indecent clamour. This lasted a few seconds. Then the
noise of a plunging struggle and the muffled thud of something falling
heavily upon the turf.--

Dr. Knott had been up all night, but his patient, Lord Denier's second
coachman, would pull through right enough; so he started on his
homeward journey in a complacent frame of mind. He reckoned it would
save him a couple of miles, let alone the long hill from Farley Row up
to Spendle Flats, if on his way back from Grimshott he went by
Brockhurst House. It is stretching a point, he admitted, to drive under
even your neighbour's back windows at five o'clock in the morning. But
the doctor being himself in an unu