ing--save another choking sound and
a fall in the entry where Christopher had stood and watched.

After that followed a silence so deep that Mallalieu felt the drums of
his ears aching intensely in the effort to catch any sound, however
small. But he heard nothing--not even a sigh. It was as if all the awful
silences that had ever been in the cavernous places of the world had
been crystallized into one terrible silence and put into that room.

He reached out at last and found his candle and the matches, and he got
more light and leaned forward in the bed, looking.

"Can't ha' got 'em both!" he muttered. "Both? But----"

He slowly lifted himself out of bed, huddled on some of the garments
that lay carefully folded on the chair, and then, holding the candle to
the floor, went forward to where the woman lay. She had collapsed
between the foot of the bed and the wall; her shoulders were propped
against the wall and the grotesque turban hung loosely down on one
shoulder. And Mallalieu knew in that quick glance that she was dead, and
he crept onward to the door and looked at the other still figure, lying
just as supinely in the passage that led to the living-room. He looked
longer at that ... and suddenly he turned back into his
parlour-bedchamber, and carefully avoiding the dead woman put on his
boots and began to dress with feverish haste.

And while he hurried on his clothes Mallalieu thought. He was not sure
that he had meant to kill these two. He would have delighted in killing
them certainly, hating them as he did, but he had an idea that when he
fired he only meant to frighten them. But that was neither here nor
there now. They were dead, but he was alive--and he must get out of
that, and at once. The moors--the hills--anywhere....

A sudden heavy knocking at the door at the back of the cottage set
Mallalieu shaking. He started for the front--to hear knocking there,
too. Then came voices demanding admittance, and loudly crying the dead
woman's name. He crept to a front window at that, and carefully drew a
corner of the blind and looked out, and saw many men in the garden. One
of them had a lantern, and as its glare glanced about Mallalieu set eyes
on Cotherstone.

CHAPTER XXX

COTHERSTONE

Cotherstone walked out of the dock and the court and the Town Hall
amidst a dead silence--which was felt and noticed by everybody but
himself. At that moment he was too elated, too self-satisfied to notice
anything