Page:The Fate of Fenella (1892).djvu/317

 into the "might be" was one that he strove manfully to put away. It must not be as a Judas, he told himself, that he approached the bedside of his friend, sick, perhaps, unto death at this very moment.

Aye! sick unto death, though even the doctor who attended poor stricken Frank would have told you there was hope still. What did the doctor know of the last terrible scene in a life's tragedy to which his patient had been a helpless witness, before he dragged himself back, quaking with fever and affright, to the cottage wherein he had taken up his temporary abode? What if the love that had linked him for a space with Lucille de Vigny had had little in common with the "holy flame that forever burneth"? What if it had been nothing but the evanescent and unholy outcome of "fantasy's hot fire"? It had yet left a recollection behind it which rendered it more terrible for him to see her tortured and slain than another and a better woman. That second during which the lunatic's knife had been pressed against her heart, the second during which she had shrieked aloud to him for help, a hideous, unmelodious shriek, more like a squall of far-gone animalish agony than a woman's shriek, had utterly unmanned him. He had realized in that short space all the horrors of a Dantesque hell whence rescue is impossible. Yielding to the mad impulse of the moment, he would have flung