He thought
that perhaps Sir Horace had fallen asleep in a chair in the library, and
he went there. He listened at the door but could hear no sound. Then he
turned on his torch and by its light he saw a dreadful sight. Sir Horace
was lying huddled up near the desk--dead--just dead, he thought, because
there were little bubbles of blood on his lips as if they had been blown
there when breathing his last. He didn't wait to see any more, but he
turned and ran out of the house.
"I didn't believe his story, though Miss Fanning did, but he stuck to it
and seemed so frightened that I thought there might be something in it
till he brought out that he'd lost his revolver somewhere. Then I
remembered the horrid threats he'd used against Sir Horace, and I was
convinced that he had committed the murder. But of course I dared not let
him think I suspected him, and I pretended to console him. But the
feeling that kept running through my head was that both of us would be
suspected of the murder.
"I told this to Birchill, and that frightened him still more. 'What are
we to do?' he kept saying. 'We shall both be hanged.' Then, after a
while, we recovered ourselves a bit and began to look at it from a more
common-sense point of view.
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