The words he gasped were drowned by a cry, Elsie Welcome, coming for the first time since her return to Druce into the drinking room, saw her sister standing upon the rostrum, poised to sing. "Patience! Patience!" she screamed in a voice of despair. "Oh, my sister, what brought you to this place?" She fell to the floor fainting. The whole cafe was in an uproar. Carter Anson, roused to fury by the disturbance, fought his way through the crowd to the place where he had seen her fall. Druce, escaped from Harry Boland, struggled from another angle to make his way through the mob. As if by magic half a score of policemen suddenly hemmed in the fighting mass. Druce, struggling blindly to make a pathway for himself, suddenly looked up to see Mary Randall standing on a table on the opposite side of the room directing the police. A wave of maniacal anger overwhelmed him. In a flash his hand went to his pocket and reappeared with a pistol. There was an explosion, a man's yell of rage, followed by a choking gulp of mortal anguish. Druce was seized and flung to the floor. At the same moment Mary Randall, leaping down from her table, ran to the center of the room. Carter Anson lay there, struggling through his last throes,--the bullet in his brain. CHAPTER XXIII AFTER THE TRAGEDY Mary Randall stood beside the dead body of Carter Anson. Such tragedy had not entered into her plans, nor had she conceived what it might be to see a man die bearing the bullet intended for her own intrepid heart. A strange numbness possessed her faculties. She heard the voice of Mrs. Welcome beside her. The mother was speaking with anguished entreaty to Elsie. The girl had risen to her feet and was gazing with a dreadful fascination at Druce, writhing in the grasp of the officers who seized him. "Come, Miss Randall," one of her police aids said to the reformer. "This is no place for you--now." "There must be something I can do," she spoke with a flash of her usual energy, then laid her hand on Mrs. Welcome's arm. "Harvey Spencer is here," she said. "There he is trying to get through the crowd to us now. Perhaps he can help you to persuade your daughter to go away with you." Elsie Welcome looked at Mary Randall, who was destined never to forget the pitiful revelation of the girl's dark eyes. Mary Randall read that despair of the lost mingled with woman's intense clinging to the man she has chosen,--her strange stubborn clinging, when, entangled, she hears an echo of happier and purer love. "How dare you meddle in people's affairs like this and put us into such dreadful trouble?" Elsie asked of the one who would help her. Then to her mother, pulling away from her longing clasp, "You understand that at a time like this my place is with my husband." Elsie doubled under the arms which would have detained her and ran out of the cafe.