He was drawing her out of the room, but she resisted him suddenly. "I can't go. I can't leave him--while he lives. Burke, don't, please, bother about me! Are you--are you going to fetch a doctor?" "Yes," said Burke. She looked at him, her eyes wide and piteous. "Then please go now--go quickly! I--will stay with him till you come back." "I shall have to leave you for some hours," he said. "Oh, never mind that!" she answered, "Just be as quick as you can, that's all! I will be with him. I--shan't be afraid." She was urging him to the door, but he turned back. He went to the table, picked up the revolver he had laid there, and put it away in a cupboard which he locked. She marked the action, and as he came to her again, laid a trembling hand upon his arm. "Burke! Could it--could it have been an accident?" "No. It couldn't," said Burke. He paused a moment, looking at her in a way she did not understand. She wondered afterwards what had been passing in his mind. But he said no further word except a brief, "Good-bye!" Ten minutes later, she heard the quick thud of his horse's hoofs as he rode into the night. CHAPTER IX THE ABYSS "Sylvia!" Was it a voice that spoke in the overwhelming silence, or was it the echo in her soul of a voice that would never speak again? Sylvia could not decide. She had sat for so long, propped against a chair, watching that still figure on the floor, straining her senses to see or hear some sign of breathing, trying to cheat herself into the belief that he slept, and then with a wrung heart wondering if he were not better dead. All memory of the bitterness and the cruel disappointment that he had brought into her life had rolled away from her during those still hours of watching. She did not think of herself at all; only of Guy, once so eager and full of sparkling hope, now so tragically fallen in the race of life. All her woman's tenderness was awake and throbbing with a passionate pity for this lover of her youth. Why, oh why had he done this thing? The horror of it oppressed her like a crushing, physical weight. Was it for this that she had persuaded Burke to rescue him from the depths to which he had sunk? Had she by her rash interference only precipitated his final doom--she who had suffered so deeply for his sake, who had yearned so ardently to bring him back? Burke had been against it from the beginning; Burke knew to his cost the hopelessness of it all. Ah, would it have been better if she had listened to him and refrained from attempting the impossible? Would it not have been preferable to accept failure rather than court disaster? What had she done? What had she done? "Sylvia!" Surely the old Guy was speaking to her! Those pallid lips could make no sound; the new, strange Guy was dead. As in a dream, she answered him through the silence, feeling as if she spoke into the shadows of the Unknown. "Yes, Guy? Yes? I am here."