The gleaming, upraised steel descended on the bare, white breast, and Sibyl’s eyes flared wide open, while her dying shriek rang through the house, “Murder! Murder! Murder!” CHAPTER XV. THE TRAGEDY. That awful, blood-curdling cry of agony and despair rang through and through the silent house, hushed in the repose of slumber. The echoes caught it up and prolonged it in awful, sound waves: “Murder! Murder! Murder!” There was no ear in that great house upon which it did not fall. Talbot Strangemore, keeping his wakeful vigil in patient expectation of a summons from Nina, heard it first, and rushed madly from the room out into the faintly-lighted hall. His first thought was of his wife; but when he ran to her apartments, so sacred until now from his intrusion, he found the outer door locked against him, and, horrified and bewildered, he turned away. In a few moments the corridors were full of excited people running hither and thither, looking into each other’s blanched faces, and asking what was the matter, and was it really a shriek of “Murder” that had roused them from slumber. Miss Drusilla was there in nightcap and slippers, with a large red shawl hastily thrown over her flapping night-robe. Helen and Virgie were there in dressing-gowns hastily huddled over their white wrappers; all the men were there in various stages of dishabille, the servants were all there too, and but two of the whole household were missing--those two were Mrs. Strangemore and Mrs. St. Alban. Some ran hastily to one door--some to another--Nina’s was locked; Sibyl had forgotten hers in her joy at witnessing her rival’s flight. They entered readily. It was Helen Starr who entered first. Her shriek of horror and dismay rang in the hearing of all long afterward. It announced the tragedy that in a minute more every one crowded in to gaze upon. No one ever forgot that tragic sight in the dimly-lighted room, where some one quickly brightened the lamp for a clearer view. Sibyl St. Alban lay wounded and apparently dying, across the bed, her life-blood staining her white robes and the white counterpane in a ghastly torrent, while a bloody dagger lay carelessly upon the floor. They crowded around her, and the dim, fast glazing eyes searched their faces with mute yearning until Talbot Strangemore came. Her drawn lips faintly murmured his name: “Talbot!” “Sibyl!” He took her hand compassionately in his and looked at her with dazed, horrified eyes. Some faint fear came over him that she had thrown away her life because she had lost him. “My poor Sibyl,” he repeated, and the lips she had opened to speak to him closed without a sound, the white lids dropped heavily over the blue imploring eyes in a momentary unconsciousness. Better for him had it been an eternal sleep. “Let someone bring a doctor,” he said, hastily, and one of the half-dazed men-servants went out to do his bidding.