One only still stood upright, and he was the man whose obtrusive figure and sordid expression had so revolted me in the beginning. There was no color now in his flabby and heavily fallen cheeks. The eyes, in whose false sheen I had seen so much of evil, were glazed now, and his big and burly frame shook the door it pressed against. He was staring at a small slip of paper he held, and, from his anxious looks, appeared to miss something which neither of us had power to supply. It was a spectacle to make devils rejoice, and mortals fly aghast. But Eunice had a spirit like an angel and drawing near him, she said: "Is there anything I can do for you, Cousin John?" He started, looked at her with the same blank gaze he had hitherto cast at the wall; then some words formed on his working lips and we heard: "I can not reckon; I was never good at figures; but if Luke is gone, and William, and Hector, and Barbara's boy, and Janet,--_how much does that leave for me_?" He was answered almost the moment he spoke; but it was by other tongues and in another world than this. As his body fell forward, I tore open the door before which he had been standing, and, lifting the almost fainting Eunice in my arms, I carried her out into the night. As I did so, I caught a final glimpse of the pictured face I had found it so hard to understand a couple of hours before. I understood it now. A surprise awaited us as we turned toward the gate. The mist had lifted and a keen but not unpleasant wind was driving from the north. Borne on it, we heard voices. The village had emptied itself, probably at the alarm given by the lawyer, and it was these good men and women whose approach we heard. As we had nothing to fear from them, we went forward to meet them. As we did so, three crouching figures rose from some bushes we passed and ran scurrying before us through the gateway. They were the late comers who had shown such despair at being shut out from this fatal house, and who probably did not yet know the doom they had escaped. * * * * * There were lanterns in the hands of some of the men who now approached. As we stopped before them, these lanterns were held up, and by the light they gave we saw, first, the lawyer's frightened face, then the visages of two men who seemed to be persons of some authority. "What news?" faltered the lawyer, seeing by our faces that we knew the worst. "Bad," I returned; "the poison had lost none of its virulence by being mixed so long with the wine." "How many?" asked the man on his right anxiously. "Eight," was my solemn reply. "There were but eight," faltered the lawyer; "that means, then, all?" "All," I repeated. A murmur of horror rose, swelled, then died out in tumult as the crowd swept on past us.