"How lovely!" he murmured, in that deep, rich voice which always vibrated so strangely in her ears. His moment had come. "Lovely," she echoed, and slipped away, like some shy, wild thing afeard of its own voice. Reynolds was burning with a desire to speak to her of his love, and she, hardly knowing why, felt a sweet dread of him. She tripped along through what had been a broad hall and turned into an open space where some of the walls had crumbled into a great heap around the base of the stack of chimneys. Here it was that suddenly a man, wild-eyed, shaggy-headed, ragged and gaunt, sprang up before her in a menacing attitude with a heavy pistol in his hand. She gave one little chirruping scream, threw up her arms and sank in a crumpled heap to the ground. Reynolds sprang forward with a loud ejaculation. His movement had all the appearance of a furious attack upon the startled ruffian, who, in sheer self-defense, as he thought, raised the pistol and fired. Reynolds felt the blow and the dull pang of the bullet in his right shoulder. The man did not fire again, but turned and fled through the nearest opening. It was all so sudden, the whole thing happening within the space of half a minute, that no one of the actors had time to get more than a glimpse of the situation before the act was ended. The ruffian, as was afterward ascertained, was a condemned murderer who had escaped from jail just the night before he was to have been hanged. No doubt he was lying asleep when the approach of Mrs. Ransom startled him, and thinking it was an attempt to recapture him, he had fired and fled. The sound of the shot roused Mrs. Ransom from her half swoon and she leaped to her feet. Reynolds put forth his hand and touched her on the arm. "Be calm--don't get scared, I can protect you," he said, but he could not see her. A cloud was in his eyes and a reeling sensation in his brain. She looked up into his face and saw how deathly white it was. "Are you hurt?" she quaveringly asked, taking a step nearer him. He mumbled some unintelligible answer, felt blindly about in the air with his hands, staggered, gasped hoarsely, and fell at full length upon the ground, face-downward, arms outspread, and lay quite still. Suddenly, to Mrs. Ransom, the silence of the place became awful, dense, impenetrable. She screamed, but her voice seemed not to go a yard from her lips. She stood for a moment with clenched hands, her face pinched and thin, her eyes fixed upon the prostrate form of Reynolds; then she threw herself down beside him and tried with all her might to turn him so that she could see his features; but he was so heavy and she so weak that her effort was vain. She called for help until her voice became thick with hoarseness. "Oh, is he dead?" she wailed, "is he dead? Oh, won't some one come! Must he die now! Oh, and I love him so--love him so!"