divined what had happened. She pushed harder and the door flew back. Behind it on the rug where he had done his exercises so patiently lay Clarence, face down, motionless. He had fallen forward and from beneath him there flowed a thin, dark stream. It had touched the white of his shirt and discolored it.
There was no doubt that he was dead. There was no doubt as to how he had died. The pistol, which had always been in the drawer of the bedroom table, lay beside him on the white floor. In the gathering darkness she knelt down at his side and began to weep, wildly, hysterically, like a savage. The darkness and the silence engulfed her.
It was thus that Fergus found her when he came in at last.
A doctor came and after him a policeman, but there was nothing to be done. The man was dead, and, as they observed to Fergus, you could see how he came to die. There would have to be the nasty business of an inquest. The news filtered through the apartment and the elevator man and the defunct actress with the white poodle in her arms came and stood at the doorway, whispering together and offering sympathy. It was Fergus who, with all the efficiency of Hattie Tolliver herself, "took hold" and managed things.
As for Ellen, she shut herself away, with a knowledge that roused in her a new agony infinitely more profound and terrible than the first brief outburst. In the darkness of her room she lay, alone now, on one of the apple green beds, silent and quite beyond so paltry a manifestation as tears. In one hand she held a note, crumpled and damp, which had been read again and again.
It was brief although the dead man, in his agitation, had written some things over and over again. It was simple, humble, inarticulate, more real, more vivid than he had ever been in all his mild existence. It was as if all the mysterious substance that was his soul had been poured out in that last moment upon the crumpled bit of paper. He had written it in a great speed; it
