“Let me speak to Mrs. Page first,” said Stephen.  “Ask her if she will come into the drawing-room.”

For an instant Corinna hung back, with the chill of dread at her heart; and in that instant Patty flew past her like a startled spirit, while the ends of her black sash streamed behind her.  With the penetrating insight of love the girl had surmised, had seen, had understood, before a word of explanation had reached her, before even the door had swung open, and she had met the blanched faces of the men in the hall.  “It is Father,” she said quietly.  “They have hurt him.  Oh, I knew all the time that they were going to hurt him!”

Corinna, standing close at her side without touching her, for some intuition told her that the girl did not wish any support, was aware of the faces of these men, flickering slowly, like glimmering ashen lights, out of the shadows in the hall—­first Stephen’s face, with its shocked compassionate eyes; then the face of old Darrow, rock-hewn, relentless; then the face of her father, which even tragedy could not startle out of its ceremonious reserve; and beyond these familiar faces, it seemed to her that the collective face of the crowd gazed back at her with an expression which was one neither of surprise nor terror, but of the stony fortitude of the ages.  Beyond this there was the open door and the glamour of the spring night, and in the night another group with its dark burden.

“I met them just outside, and they told me,” said Stephen.  “Gershom thinks it was an accident, but we shall never know probably.  Two opposing sides were fighting it out.  A question had come up—­nobody can remember what it was—­nothing important, I think—­but two men came to blows and he got in between them—­he stood in the way—­and somebody shot him—­”

He was talking, Corinna realized, in an effort to hold Patty’s gaze, to divert her eyes by the force of his look from the burden which the men were bringing slowly up the steps outside and into the hall.

“Nobody meant to harm him,” said Gershom suddenly, speaking from the edge of the group.  “The pistol went off by mistake.  He got in the way before any one saw him—­” But from his look, Corinna knew that it was not an accident, that they had shot him because he came between them and the thing that they wanted.

The slow steps crossed the hall into the library, and above the measured beat and pause of the sound, Corinna heard the voice of Vetch as distinctly as if he were standing there before her in the centre of the group.  “The loneliest man on earth is the one who stands between two extremes.”  Yes, at the end as well as at the beginning, he had stood between two extremes!  Then Patty’s cry of anguish floated to her from the room across the hall into which they had taken him.  “Father!  Father!” Only that one word over and over again.  “Father!  Father!” Only that one word uttered steadily and softly in a tone of imploring helplessness like the wail of a frightened child.  It never ceased, this piteous sobbing, until at last the doctor went out, and left Corinna alone with the girl and Gideon Vetch.  Then Patty fell on her knees beside the couch where he lay, and a silence that was almost suffocating closed over the room.