If it were possible to turn paler, she turned paler then; and her eyes seemed to darken, as though with dread; yet there was nothing in her look but what might come from honest fear of the unknown. “Mr. Barrison! What is it that you are trying to make me think? What do you mean? Oh—_oh_!” She drew in her breath sharply. “Is that what it means? Is that what you came here for—to—tell me something? Is that it, Mr. Barrison?” Her eyes pleaded with him, looking earnestly out of her little white face. She looked a butterfly no longer; rather, a tired and frightened little girl. “Won’t you tell me what it all means?” she begged. “Miss Legaye,” Jim said gently, “there was a tragedy last night at the theater after you left.” “A tragedy?” “Yes; there was—a murder.” She stared at him, as though she did not yet understand. “A murder?” “Miss Legaye, I see it is a shock to you, but you must hear it from some one; you might as well hear it from me. Mr. Mortimer was shot last night during the last act, and is dead.” She shrieked—a thin, high, deadly shriek, which rang long in the ears of the two men. Her face grew smaller, sharper; she beat the air with her hands. The maid ran to her. News? Oh, Heaven, yes! There was no question of this being news to her; it was news that was coming close to killing her. “Say that again!” she managed to say, in a slow, thick utterance that sounded immeasurably strange from her lips. “Alan Mortimer was murdered? You said that? You are sure of it?” “Yes, Miss Legaye.” She flung up her hands wildly, and fainted dead away. CHAPTER XVI A SCARLET EVENING COAT It was a real faint. They had a good bit of difficulty in getting her out of it. There wasn’t much room in Jim Barrison’s mind for anything except self-reproach. He _knew_ that the tidings of Mortimer’s murder had come upon Kitty Legaye like a stroke of lightning. She had no more been prepared for it than she would have been prepared for the end of the world. He had an idea that the end of the world would, as a general proposition, have affected her much less. Barrison was no new hand, and not too soft-hearted or gullible; and he knew that what he had looked upon that morning was sheer, absolute shock and grief, unlooked for, terrible, devastating. Poor little Kitty, with all her frivolities, had bigness in her. As she struggled back into the gray world, she obviously tried to straighten up and steady herself. The terror was all the time at the back of her brown eyes, but she was doing her best to be game, to be, as she herself would have expressed it, “a good sport.” Of course, she wanted particulars, and he gave them to her, feeling like a pickpocket all the time. Papers were obtained, and she was induced to take coffee with brandy in it, and—at last—she broke down and cried, which was what every one had been praying for since the beginning.