Because she was lying on the floor and Reuben and Edward were bending over her, she was looking up into their faces. That seemed strange to her, but everything was strange because everything was right. In this moment, there was nothing jeopardous; she had only to speak, indeed she need not actually trouble to put her message into words, and Reuben would infallibly agree with her. There were no difficulties, after all. She had felt that it was only a question of the right moment, and here was her moment, exquisitely, miraculously, compellingly right. Her hand seemed very heavy to lift but, somehow, she lifted it, somehow she was holding Reuben’s hand and Edward’s, somehow she was joining them in friendship and forgiveness. It was right, it was right beyond all doubt. Reuben would never coerce Edward now, and she smiled happily up at them. “Reuben,” she said, then “Edward,” that was all. Her hand fell to the floor. Edward looked up from Dorothy’s dead face to see his father disappearing through the window, but Reuben need not have hurried. John Bradshaw was standing in the shrubbery twenty yards from the window, making no effort to run. There was no effort left in him. He was the spring wound up by Mr. Barraclough; now he had acted and he was relaxed; he was relaxed and happy. A life for a life, and such a life--Hepplestall’s! He had led his people out of slavery. He had shot Hepplestall. And in the light from the window, he saw rushing at him the man who was dead. There was no Annie now to laugh his superstitious fears away and to fold him in her protective arms: there was no one to tell him that the silent figure was not Hepplestall’s ghost. He believed utterly that a “boggart” was leaping at him. True, there was a leap, and a blow delivered straight at his jaw with all the force of Reuben’s passionate grief behind it, and the blow met empty air. John, felled by a mightier force than Reuben’s, felled by his ghostly fear, lay crumpled on the ground and Hepplestall, recovering balance, flung him over his shoulder like a sack and was carrying him into the house before the servants, alarmed by the shot, had reached the room. Edward met him. “I am riding for the doctor, sir,” he said. “Doctor?” said Reuben. “It’s not a doctor that is needed now, it’s a hangman. Lock that in the cellar,” he said to the servants, dropping his sprawling burden on the floor, “and go for the constables.” Then, when they were gone, when he had silenced by one look their cries of horror and they had slunk out of the door as if they and not the senseless boy they carried were the murderers, “Leave me, Edward, leave me,” he said. Edward stretched out his hand. There was sympathy in his gesture and there was, too, a claim to a share in the sorrow that had come to them. Dorothy was Edward’s mother. “Go,” said Reuben fiercely; and Edward left him with his dead. The beast had made his spring. Dorothy had not gone to the factory, and the factory had come to her.