Page:The Better Sort (New York, Charles Scribners Sons, 1903).djvu/406

THE BETTER SORT "Something has come."

"Something?" The men had both spoken.

They had stopped where they stood; she again caught the sound. "Listen! They're crying."

They waited then, and it came—came, of a sudden, with a burst and as if passing the place. A hawker, outside, with his "extra," called by some one and hurrying, bawled it as he moved. "Death of Beadel-Muffet—Extraordinary News!"

They all gasped, and Maud, with her eyes on Bight, saw him, to her satisfaction at first, turn pale. But his guest drank it in. "If it's true then"—Marshal triumphed at her—"I'm not dished."

But she only looked hard at Bight, who struck her as having, at the sound, fallen to pieces, and as having above all, on the instant, turned cold for his worried game. "Is it true?" she austerely asked.

His white face answered. "It's true."

 VIII

first thing, on the part of our friends—after each interlocutor, producing a penny, had plunged into the unfolded "Latest"—was this very evidence of their dispensing with their companion's further attendance on their agitated state, and all the more that Bight was to have still, in spite of agitation, his function with him to accomplish: a result much assisted by the insufflation of wind into Mr. Marshal's sails constituted by the fact before them. With Beadel publicly dead this gentleman's opportunity, on the terms just arranged, opened out; it was quite as if they had seen him, then and there, step, with a kind of spiritual splash, into the empty seat of the boat so launched, scarcely even taking time to master the essentials before he gave himself to the breeze. The essentials indeed he was, by their understanding, to receive in full 394