Page:Alice Stuyvesant - The Vanity Box.djvu/251

 "From the first the conversation was so very terrible that we couldn't let it be known that we were there. We looked at each other, and Ian whispered to me that we must just bear it and try to forget afterward. He said almost anything would be better than she should know who had heard such secrets. She would hate her life, only thinking that we knew. And of course we meant never to tell—never to even speak of it again to each other. Sometimes there would be blanks—sentences we didn't hear, sometimes silence, and then those most awful, awful sobbings. At last—came the two shots, one right after the other. I felt as if I should faint, and I did almost. I felt myself falling, but Ian caught me in his arms and held me up. For a few minutes I think I wasn't wholly conscious, but I never quite fainted, for I know Ian had me in his arms all the time; and when I came back to myself he was holding me still."

"What then?" Sir Ian's voice was hoarse, as if his lips and tongue were dry.

"I listened for a while, and there wasn't a sound. It seemed a ghastly kind of silence, after what had happened. At last I whispered to Ian, and asked what he thought of the shots. He answered that he was afraid they could mean only one thing, but he would go down and look. I said if he went I would go too. He must not go alone, because, if any one else had heard the shots, and came to see, it might be