When his servant went to call him in the morning, he found his master lying on the floor, with a bullet-hole in the middle of his forehead. Everybody in the barracks had been fast asleep when the poor boy had fired the shot that was to take him out of his troubles, and nobody had heard the report. At the inquest, the whole miserable story came out. Of course it came through Hugh, the only person who was in possession of it. He narrated the details of his acquaintance with the Burtons, the introduction of Jack Pomfret to the house, the scene at Rosemount when the two detectives had taken the man, Jack's confession that he had made the girl his wife a few hours previously. Hugh never forgot that interview with the Colonel, in which "Old Fireworks" poured out his wrath in no measured terms. He roundly called him an infernal fool for mixing himself up with people of whom he knew nothing, and whom Blankfield in its ignorance of their antecedents had declined to visit--and very wisely. "If it had been poor Jack, a dear lad but a foolish, I could have found it in my heart to forgive him," he ended. "But you are a man of another sort, you have got your wits about you, if you choose to exercise them. I will never pardon you that day's work. You can play with fire and not be scorched, but he couldn't. That poor boy's death lies at your door, sir. I hope you realise it." Yes, Hugh did realise it. He stood with bowed head, and could not utter a word in self-defence. The news, of course, was all over the town the next morning, or rather the double news--that George Burton had been arrested by two detectives from Scotland Yard, and that in the early morning of the following day Jack Pomfret had blown out his brains. The evidence at the inquest explained the double event. The news of her young husband's suicide reached Norah early in the morning. She had gambled and lost. The old adventurous life was in front of her again. She took the buffets of fate with the stoicism of her kind and class. She had a comfortable little nest-egg put by which stood between her and present want. If only Jack had been less emotional, she would not have troubled him much, been content with quite a little. It is to be feared that, in her bitter disappointment, she felt a little sore against Jack for his moral cowardice in getting comfortably out of it himself, and leaving her in the lurch. Anyway, she faced the situation with a courage that one could not refuse to admire. By two o'clock that same day the servants had been paid their wages, the keys of the furnished house handed over to the agent, and Mrs. Pomfret had departed for London. Murchison could never forget that terrible time till something came that seemed to dwarf all other things. In August, nineteen hundred and fourteen, there burst the first storm of the war which shook the world to its centre. In the blood-soaked plains of France he forgot everything except his country.