dull and glazed. It was an awful
thing!

Physically, he had been the very model of an English country gentleman,
tall and powerful, with great broad shoulders, and strikingly upright
carriage, full of vigorous animal life, with the slight restlessness of
the constant traveler banished by his sudden passion for the girl who
had so lately promised to be his wife.

She drew a little nearer--they were all too much overcome by the shock
of this thing to prevent her--and stood with glazed eyes looking down
upon him. Everything, even the minutest article of his dress, seemed to
appeal to her with a strange vividness. She found herself even studying
the large check of his shooting-coat and the stockings which she had
once laughingly admired, and which he had ever since worn. Her eyes
rested upon the sprig of heliotrope which, with her own fingers, she had
arranged in his button hole, as they had strolled down the garden
together just before the start; and the faint perfume which reached her
where she stood, helped her to realize that she was in the thrall of no
nightmare, but that this thing had really happened. She had never loved
him, she had never even pretended to love him, and it was less any sense
of personal loss than the hideous sin of it which swept in upon her as
she stood there looking down upon him. She recognized, as she could
never have done had he been personally dear to her, the ethical horror
of the thing. The faintness which had almost numbed her senses passed
away. In that swift battle of many sensations it was anger which
survived.

Her voice first broke the deep, awed stillness.

"Who has done this?" she cried, pointing downward.

Her words were like a sudden awakening to them all. They had been
standing like figures in a silent tableau, stricken dumb and motionless.
Now there was a stir. The fire in her tone had dissolved their torpor.
She was standing on rising ground a little above the rest of them, and
her attitude, together with the gesture by which she enforced her words,
was full of intense dramatic force. The slim undulating beauty of her
form was enhanced by the slight disorder of her dress, and her red-gold
hair--she had lost her hat--shone and glistened in the sunlight till
every thread was shining like burnished gold. They themselves were in
the shade of the dark pine trees, and she standing upon the margin of
the moor with the warm sunlight glowing around her, seemed like a being
of anoth