He catches his breath. It is quite a quarter of an hour since he began his watch. How quiet they are! There is a murmur of voices, but there is nothing that in the least indicates violence. Before his eyes there flashes in grotesque recollection the hideous picture in the _Police News_ which illustrates the high words with which the catastrophe of the groom and kitchenmaid had been heralded. He has been making a mountain out of a mole-hill; has been exaggerating his friend's emotional temperament, naturally further heightened by sleeplessness and want of food, into incipient insanity. If he were mad, or at all tending that way, would he be talking in the low rational key which he obviously must be? It is evident that her presence, her eye, her--yes, what more likely?--her touch have soothed and conjured away what of excessive or perilous there was in his emotion. They have been together half an hour now. All danger is certainly over. Why should he any longer continue his officious and needless watch?--superfluously spying upon them? Relieved as to what he had thought his worst fear, and yet with an uncommon bitterness about his heart, he turns to withdraw, and his hand is already on the lock of the door which leads into the corridor, when suddenly, without any warning, there reaches his ear the noise of a loud, crashing fall, followed--accompanied, rather--by a piercing scream. In infinitely less than a second he finds himself on his knees beside the prostrate body of Byng, who, with blood pouring from his forehead, is stretched upon the floor of the _salon_. Even at this second there flashes upon him, ludicrous and dreadful, the memory of the _Police News_. This scene has a grotesque likeness to the final one of the groom and kitchenmaid series, only that in the present case the heroine, instead of staggering backward with the top of her head flying up to the ceiling, is hanging unharmed over her fallen lover. "Are you hurt?" cries Jim in frantic anxiety, looking at her across the prostrate figure, and unable to eradicate from his mind the revolver idea. "Did he hit you? I did not hear a shot." "Oh no, no! but he," fetching her breath in terrible gasps, and hanging over the bleeding man with that utter abandonment of all disguise, in which a great naked grief sweeps away our sophistications--"he is dead!" "Oh no, he is not," answers Jim hastily, tearing open Byng's waistcoat and laying his hand upon his heart. "He has only fainted. Get some water! Have you got any salts? No; do not lift his head"--seeing that she is agonizedly trying to raise his prone head and rest it upon her knees--"he had better be as flat as he can. Quick, some water!"