He was clear of the grounds before Adelaide, the first to move, cast a furtive glance at her brother.  Her own disaster was swallowed up for her in the thought of how he had been struck down.  But she could read nothing in his face.  He was simply gazing straight ahead, and looking so like his father at his most unfathomable.  As soon as he had fully realized what the will meant, his nerves had stopped feeling and his brain had stopped thinking.  Adelaide next noted Dory, and grew cold from head to foot.  All in a rush it came over her how much she had relied upon her prospective inheritance, how little upon herself.  What would Dory think of her now?  And Ross—­what a triumph for him, what a narrow escape!  Had he suspected?  Had others in the town known that of which they of the family were in complete ignorance?  Oh, the horror of the descent—­the horror of the rude snatching away of the golden aureole!  “Father, father, how could you do it?  How could you hurt us so?” she muttered.  Then, up before her rose his face with that frightful look in the eyes.  “But how doing it made him suffer!” she thought.  And the memory of those hours on hours she had spent with him, buried alive, flooded over her.  “Doing it killed him!” she said to herself.

She felt cruel fingers grinding into her arm.  With a sharp cry she sprang up.  Her brother was facing her, his features ablaze with all the evil passions in his untrained and unrestrained nature. “You knew!” he hissed.  “You traitor!  You knew he was doing this.  You honeyfugled him.  And you and Hargrave get it all!”

Adelaide shrank as she would not have shrunk under a lash.

“O Arthur!  Arthur!” she cried, clasping her hands and stretching them toward him.

“You admit it, do you?” he shouted, seizing her by the shoulders like a madman.  “Yes, your guilty face admits it.  But I’ll undo your work.  I’ll break the will.  Such an outrage as that, such a robbery, won’t stand in court for a minute.”

Dory had risen, was moving to fling the brother from the sister; but Mrs. Ranger was before him.  Starting up from the stupor into which Judge Torrey’s explanation had thrown her, she thrust herself between her children.  “Arthur!” she said, and her voice was quiet and solemn.  “Your father is dead.”  She drew herself up, and facing her son in her widow’s black, seemed taller than he.  “If I had needed any proof that he was right about what he did with his own,” she went on, “I’d have found it in your face and in what you just said to your sister.  Go to the glass there, boy!  Look at your face and remember your words!”

Young Hargrave left the room, went to the garden where they could see him from the windows and call him if they wished.  Arthur hung his head before his mother’s gaze.  “It isn’t his will,” he muttered.  “Father in his right mind would never have made such a will.”