The housekeeper turned the key in the lock, and opened the door. At the same moment a figure came flying along the corridor from Caryl’s room, and Rhoda Pembury, pale and alarmed, joined the little group of three persons: Sir Robert, Jack Rotherfield, and Mrs. Hawkes. “What is it? What has happened?” cried the girl. “What is all the noise?” Sir Robert fell back, reeling. “Thank God!” he said hoarsely, under his breath, as he looked at her. She stared at him, trembling, then at Jack Rotherfield, who was striving to get past Mrs. Hawkes; and at the housekeeper, who held him fast by the arm. The housekeeper suddenly relaxed her hold of Jack and beckoned to Rhoda. “Come in with me,” she said. Rhoda staggered back. “What is it? In my room?” stammered she. The housekeeper nodded. “Lady Sarah,” she whispered. “She is--” And with her lips she formed the word “dead.” Both Sir Robert and Rhoda understood, and in silence they both entered the room, where Mrs. Hawkes turned up the light. There, under the window, in her light satin dress, with the jewels round her neck and on her hands, the flowers still pinned to her bodice, her beautiful dark hair disordered by her fall, lay Lady Sarah, inert, lifeless. A little dark stain on her satin bodice showed where the blood had oozed through from the wound in her breast. Jack Rotherfield burst into the group and threw himself on the ground beside the dead woman. Unprincipled as he was, guilty as he was, not one of the three persons present could fail to be moved by the anguish in his face. Solemn as the moment was, and deeply as they were all impressed by the swiftness of the unexpected and as yet imperfectly understood tragedy, not one of those three, Sir Robert, Rhoda, or Mrs. Hawkes, showed half the despair which convulsed the features of the young man. He was mad with grief. He babbled out words to which they would all fain have shut their ears; he took the lifeless hands and pressed them within his own, staring down at the dead face, calling to her, now loudly, now softly, in a way which wrung all their hearts. The group broke up on the arrival of the doctor, and only Mrs. Hawkes and Sir Robert remained in the room while he made his brief examination. There had never been the least doubt about the result of it. Lady Sarah had been shot through the heart, and must have died instantaneously. Jack Rotherfield made no secret of the fact that he had been the cause of her death, but it soon leaked out that, while he declared that he had accidentally shot the lady, while intending only to attract her attention and to frighten her, he had believed, as he did so, that the woman he was frightening was Rhoda Pembury. It was Lady Sarah’s scream which had acquainted him with the fact that the bullet had struck the wrong woman.