Page:The silent prince - a story of the Netherlands (IA cu31924008716957).pdf/196

 and tinder, and Reynold, seizing some ‘half-burnt fragments of wood and bits of brush and leaves, soon had a cheerful fire blazing on the wide hearth. The butler had fallen half unconscious to the ground, faint from the loss of blood. Reynold made a hasty examination of the wound. A glance convinced him that the injuries were fatal. It was a question if the old man would ever regain consciousness.

Reynold poured a spoonful of brandy between the closed lips, but the wounded man only moaned. Covering him with his own cape the young officer paced back and forth. The trees rustled softly in the night wind, the stars twinkled overhead, and no sound of life was heard except the occasional neighing of the horses tethered near by. A bat flitted by, chasing moths. The owls began to hoot in the trees; the weird churring of the night-jar and the call of quails in the distant fields thrilled through the air. His reflections were sad. “How strangely ordered are the lives of men and women," he thought. “These walls once sheltered a happy household. Now their home is a pile of blackened ruins and its inmates are scattered or dead.” Then he thought of his own home in the possession of strangers; his father and mother dead and his sister perhaps drinking a cup of anguish bitterer than death, while the woman he loved was sundered forever from him.