Janet could never understand how that horrible moment went, nor how it all happened. Something seemed suddenly to hurtle through the air, a dark, swift, rapid thing, like a thunderbolt. She had scarcely felt the sensation of being pushed away when she was conscious of Meredith lying at her feet, his white face upturned to the faint light, and of that dark thing over him seizing him, dashing his head against the pavement. Janet uttered a cry, but it was not her cry that brought flying feet along the road in both directions, and evoked a little tumult round the insensible figure. She mingled with it instinctively; she could not tell why, keeping silent, partly that she was struck dumb with terror, partly with an instinct of self-preservation, which seized her in this strange, sudden, awful emergency. When the door was opened--and her senses were so acute that she saw it was Vicars who had rushed to see what the commotion was--she managed to steal in unseen, to fly upstairs, and shelter herself in her room. What did it matter where she went? He had been killed before her eyes, with the laugh on his lips. Killed--struck dead at a blow! And she had seen it done, and knew who had done it, and was all mixed up and involved in the horrible, horrible catastrophe. It may seem cruel that this was Janet’s first thought, but she was so young. She had done her share of all this wrong so carelessly, with no particular meaning, thinking not much harm. “Not much harm,” she said to herself, piteously. No harm, no harm--only to amuse herself; and lo! it had come to murder, to sudden, swift fate. She was all one throb from head to foot, of horror and panic and wild excitement. Had any one seen her? Would she be mixed up in it? Would she have to stand forward and avow it all before the world in the light of day! Oh, what could Janet do? Where could she fly? How escape the dreadful revelation, the story which would be spread over all the world, the horrible fact of being mixed up in a murder? For the second time, when he seized Meredith by the shoulders, and dashed his head against the stones, she had recognized Dolff’s face, distorted, almost beyond recognition, by passion. What could be more dreadful than to be the witness of it all, the only one who could tell--mixed up in it as no one else in the world could be?