Arden put the revolver back in his pocket, seized her by the shoulder.  “Come away from that!” he ordered roughly, and half-lifted her to her feet.

With a cry so awful that Adelaide swayed and almost swooned at hearing it, Estelle wrenched herself free, flung herself on her lover’s body, buried her fingers in his hair, covered his dead face with kisses, bathed her lips in the blood that welled from his heart.  Shouts and heavy, quick tramping from many directions—­the tempest of murder was drawing people to its center as a cyclone sucks in leaves.  Fright in Arden Wilmot’s face, revealed to Adelaide in the light streaming from the big drawing-room windows.  A group—­a crowd—­a multitude—­pouring upon the lawns from every direction—­swirling round Arden as he stood over the prostrate intermingled forms of his sister and her dead lover.

Then Adelaide, clinging to the door frame to steady herself, heard Arden say in a loud blustering voice:  “I found this fellow insulting my sister, and I treated him as a Wilmot always treats an insult.”  And as the words reached her, they fired her.  All her weakness, all her sense of helplessness fled.

Out of the circle came a man bearing unconscious Estelle, blood upon her face, upon her bosom, blood dripping from her hands.  “Where shall I take her?” asked the man of Adelaide.  “A doctor’s been sent for.”

“Into the hall—­on the sofa—­at the end—­and watch by her,” said Del, in quick, jerking tones.  Her eyes were ablaze, her breath came in gusts.  Without waiting to see where he went with his burden, she rushed down the broad steps and through the crowd, pushing them this way and that.  She faced Arden Wilmot—­not a lady, but a woman, a flaming torch of outraged human feeling.

“You lie!” she cried, and he seemed to wither before her.  “You lie about him and about her!  You, with the very clothes you’re dressed in, the very liquor you’re drunk with, the very pistol that shot him down, paid for by her earnings!  He never offended you—­not by look or word.  You murdered him—­I saw—­heard.  You murdered the man she was to marry, the man she loved—­murdered him because she loved him.  Look at him!”

The crowd widened its circle before the sweep of her arm.  Lorry’s blood-stained body came into view.  His face, beautiful and, in its pale calm, stronger than life, was open to the paling sky.  “There lies a man,” she sobbed, and her tears were of the kind that make the fires of passion burn the fiercer.  “A man any woman with a woman’s heart would have been proud to be loved by.  And you—­you’ve murdered him!”

“Take care, Mrs. Hargrave,” a voice whispered in her ear.  “They’ll lynch him.”

“And why not?” she cried out.  “Why should such a creature live?”

A hundred men were reaching for Arden, and from the crowd rose that hoarse, low, hideous sound which is the first deep bay of the unleashed blood-madness.  “No, no!” she begged in horror, and waved them back.