Page:The Blind Man's Eyes (July 1916).pdf/298

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THE BLIND MAN'S EYES

She had been feeling, the moment before Donald had spoken, that Philip Eaton had played upon her that evening in making her take him to his confederate in the ravine in order to plan and consummate something here. Above her grief and horror at the killing of her cousin and the danger to her father, had risen the anguish of her guilt with Eaton, the agony of her betrayal. But their accusation that Eaton had killed Wallace Blatchford, seeing him, knowing him—in the light—had swept all that away; all there was of her seemed to have risen in denial of that. Before her eyes, half shut, she saw again the body of her cousin Wallace lying in its blood on the floor, with her father kneeling beside it, his blind eyes raised in helplessness to the light; but she saw now another body too—Eaton's—not here—lying somewhere in the bare, wind-swept woods, shot down by those pursuing him.

She looked at the face of the clock and then down to the pendulum to see whether it had stopped; but the pendulum was swinging. The hands stood at half past one o'clock; now she recalled that, in her first wild gaze about the room when she rushed in with the others, she had seen the hands showing a minute or so short of twenty minutes past one. Not quite a quarter of an hour had passed since the alarm! The pursuit could not have moved far away. She reopened the window through which the pursuers had passed and stepped out onto the dark lawn. She stood drawing the robe about her against the chill night air, dazed, stunned. The house behind her, the stables, the chauffeurs' quarters above the garages, the gardeners' cottages, all blazed now with light, but she saw no one about. The menservants—except the steward—had joined the