For a while I remained kneeling by the body of the Count in a numbed stupor, All was so quiet and peaceful that I could not credit what had happened in this last hour, not though I held the Count within my arms. Then from the floor of the room above there came once more the light tapping sound of a woman's heels. I looked about me. The table lay overturned, the rugs were heaped and scattered, and the barrel of my pistol winked in the sputtering light of the fire. I rose, snatched up my sword, and fled out on to the snow. The moon was setting and the moonlight grey upon the garden, with the snow under foot very crisp and dry. I sheathed my sword and clambered on to the coping. I turned to look at the Castle--how quietly it slept, and how brightly burned the lights in those two rooms!--and then dropped to the ledge upon the further side of the wall. I had reached the top of the ridge of rock, when a cry rang out into the night--a cry, shrill and lonesome, in a woman's voice--a cry followed by a great silence. I halted in an agony. 'Twas not fear that I felt; 'twas not even pity. The cry spoke of suffering too great for pity, and I stood aghast at the sound of it, aghast at the thought that my handiwork had begotten it. 'Twas not repeated, however, and I tore down the ridge in a frenzy of haste, taking little care where I set my hands or my feet. How it was that I did not break my neck I have never been able to think. The village, I remember, was dark and lifeless save just at one house, whence came a murmur of voices, and a red beam of light slipped through a chink in the shutter and lay like a rillet of blood across the snow. Once clear of the houses. I ran at full speed down the track. At the corner of the wood, I stopped and looked upwards before I plunged among the trees. The moon had set behind the mountains while I was descending the ridge, and the Castle loomed vaguely above me as though at that spot the night was denser than elsewhere. 'Twas plain that no alarm had been taken, that the cry had not been heard. I understood the reason of this afterwards. The two rooms in the tower were separated by a great interval from the other bedrooms. But what of the Countess, I thought? I pictured her in a swoon upon the corpse of her husband. Within the coppice 'twas so black that I could not see my hand when I raised it before me, and I went groping my way by guesswork towards the trees to which we had tethered our horses. I dared not call out to Larke; I feared even the sound of my footsteps. Every rustle of the bushes seemed to betray a spy. In the end I began to fancy that I should wander about the coppice until dawn, when close to my elbow there rose a low crooning song: Que toutes joies et toutes honneurs Viennent d'armes et d'amours. "Jack!" I whispered. The undergrowth crackled as he crushed it beneath his feet. "Morrice, is that you? Where are you?"