She leaped to her feet, as I to mine. Her eyes, alight with an inscrutable expression, looked into mine; her cheeks became diffused with the crimsoned glow of righteous indignation; her form was convulsed; she quivered from head to feet. For a moment this scene endured. Then ere my lips, but lately contracted for the chaste but unbidden salute, could frame the first stammered syllable of an apology, she buried her ensanguined face in her hands, and hysteria assailed her--a hysteria so acute and so violent that not tears but an outburst resembling laughter--laughter wild, startling and most distressing to hear--came from her. She turned and dashed from the room. My heart paused in its quick beating. In one mad moment of indiscretion I had destroyed her confidence in me, had brought down in crashing ruins my hopes, my dreams, my new-found joy. I felt that I must go hence--that I must quit that domicile forever, and the sooner the better. With my brain in a whirl, I looked about me for my hat and my umbrella. A loud and a compelling voice spoke behind me. I faced about. In the doorway through which she had just fled stood a fearsome apparition. It was her uncle, that man so given to carnage among the beasts and birds of the field, that unerring, that unfailing marksman. He was in his shirt sleeves, his arms bared to his elbows. Upon his face was a fixed grin of demoniac determination--the look of one who smiles even as he slays his prey. And in his hands--ah, dreadful final detail of this dreadful picture--he held outstretched, extended and presented in my general direction, a double-barrelled fowling piece, enormous in size and glittering with metal ornamentation. "Young man," he cried out, "have one look at this!" In times of the most extreme peril the thoughts clarify with inconceivable rapidity. In a flash I comprehended all. She had told him of the insult to her maidenly modesty, and for it he meant to have my heart's blood. I was about to become an extinct and bleeding corse. But before he could raise the hideous instrument of death to his shoulder an expedient occurred to me. I would save myself from slaughter and coincidentally save him from the crime of dyeing his hands with the gore of a fellow being. A low window at the west side of the room, immediately adjacent to the couch whereon I had been seated, providentially stood open. I would leap from it and flee. Without a moment's hesitation I did so.