Before she could give outcry or reach them, there came an out-spitting of fire from the ugly muzzle and a report which the confined space magnified to a sullen roar.  Edwardes lurched suddenly forward and remained motionless with his face down and his arms outspread upon the desk, while a tiny red puddle spread on the mahogany.

Fairley had leaped back and cowered, suddenly sobered, against the wall as the outer door opened and figures poured into the room.

CHAPTER XXIV

After the low scream that came moaningly up from her breast, which was drowned in the echoes of the report, Mary Burton made no outcry.  She no longer leaned limp and nerveless against the support of the doorway.  Something had seemed to snap the cords of her paralysis and out of her blanched face her eyes stared wide and piteous.  As the older banker staggered back she was quick to reach the motionless figure and to lift its head to her breast.  Yet she did not really have to look, something fateful and unquestionable told her from the first instant that no human aid could avail—­and that he would not speak again or move a muscle in life.  His employees found her supporting the weight of his shoulders against her bosom and seeking to staunch with her handkerchief the flow of blood from the temple.

In one trivial respect the cruelties of her day of cumulative tragedy were abated.  The steel-nosed bullet, even at that close range, had cut clean and spared his face, save for the trickle of red and the smirch of powder burn—­such defacement as she could not have endured.  The eyes, not yet glazed, gazed out with their accustomed resolute calm and the lips were firm, a little grim with the purpose of thwarting another’s death, but it was still, though lifeless, a face without surrender.

The girl bent low, whispering into the ear which could not hear her, and then she raised her eyes, still holding his head against her shoulder, to see the little circle of stunned faces, and hear Fairley’s voice announcing in broken syllables, but very quietly, “I was—­attempting suicide—­and he grappled with me.”

She knew even while she awaited the physicians that no spark of life remained and that this was the last time her arms would ever be closed around him in life or death, and as she stood there, for the time upheld by a strength beyond her ordinary physical powers, strange inconsequential little fragments of talk, things he had said to her and she to him, were repeating themselves in her memory, and the exact inflections of his voice were renewing themselves in her ears.

Then as two physicians hurried in, closely heeled by two policemen, she surrendered her beloved burden to stronger hands, and, as she moved back with still no trace of tears in her wide eyes, the whole picture darkened and out of muscle and nerve and brain-cell went every vestige of autonomy and consciousness.  They caught her as she fell and laid her on a broad upholstered window seat.  When her eyes next opened hot pains were scorching her temples and her gaze turned instinctively toward the desk.  It was empty of its human burden, and, save for the clerk who had that morning received her in the outer room and a physician, the private office was empty, too.