She paused for a moment; Ashton-Kirk clasped his knee with both hands and regarded her with interest.

“It was a sort of subdued fierceness,” continued Miss Vale—­“as though he were setting his face against some invisible force and defying it.  When he mentioned our happiness that was to be, I could see his hands close tightly, I could read menace in the set of his jaw.  As he was going, he said to me: 

“’There has been something—­a something that you’ve never been able to understand—­keeping us apart.  But it is about at an end.  Human nature endures a great deal, sometimes, but it’s endurance does not last forever.  To-night, my dear, puts an end to my endurance.  I am going to show what I should have shown long ago—­that I’m a man.’

“Then he went away, and I was frightened.  All sorts of possibilities presented themselves to me—­vague, indefinite, formless terrors.  I tried to shake them off, but could not.  It became firmly fixed in my mind that something was going to happen—­that Allan was about to—­to—­” here the steady voice faltered once more, “to take a step that would bring danger upon him.

“And that night I went to Mrs. Barron’s as I had promised.  I talked to people—­I laughed—­I even danced.  But never for a moment did the fear cease gripping at my heart.  At last I could stand it no longer.  I felt that I must go to where this danger was confronting Allan; and as the house in Christie Place was the first that arose in my mind, I went there.

“I saw the cab upon the opposite side of the street; and the driver of it looked at me so hard that I drove on without stopping, as the newspaper states.  But my courage came back in a few moments; I returned and went in.”

“You halted on the stairs,” said Ashton-Kirk.  “Why?”

“Because I saw a light moving about in the hallway above,” answered Miss Vale.  Then she added:  “But how did you know that I stopped upon the stairs?”

“I did not know it,” replied Ashton-Kirk.  “In his story the cab driver says you entered at Hume’s door and went upstairs.  I have found that the position which his cab occupied at the time was fully fifteen feet west of Hume’s doorway, making it impossible for him to see whether you went up at once, or not.  In the face of what immediately followed your entrance, or rather, what is said to have followed it, I thought it reasonable to suppose that you had stopped!”

“Thank you,” said Miss Vale.

“You say there was a light moving about; but what else did you see?”

“Nothing.”

“But you heard something?”

“Yes; the revolver shot, and then the dreadful cry that followed it.”

Ashton-Kirk unclasped his hands from about his knee, placed them upon the arms of his chair and leaned forward.

“But between the two—­after the shot, and before the cry, you heard a door close,” he said.

She gave a little gasp of surprise.