leaving Edmee.  I distinctly remembered firing it at a pewit an hour before, for Edmee had wanted to examine the bird’s plumage.  Further, when I heard the shot which had hit her, my gun was in my hands, and I had not thrown it down until a few seconds later, so it could not have been this weapon which had gone off on falling.  Besides, even granting a fatality which was incredible, I was much too far from Edmee at that moment to have shot her.  Finally, I had not a single bullet on me throughout the day; and it was impossible for my gun to have been loaded, unknown to myself, since I had not unslung it after killing the pewit.

Quite convinced, therefore, that I was not the cause of the hideous accident, it remained to me to find an explanation of this crushing catastrophe.  To me it was perfectly simple; some booby with a gun, I thought, must have caught sight of Edmee’s horse through the branches and mistaken it for a wild beast; and I did not dream of accusing any one of a deliberate attempt at murder.  I discovered, however, that I was accused myself.  I drew the truth from Marcasse.  He informed me that the chevalier and all the people who took part in the hunt had attributed the misfortune to a pure accident, their opinion being that, to my great sorrow, my gun had gone off when my horse threw me, for it was believed that I had been thrown.  This was practically the view they all took.  In the few words that Edmee had been able to utter she seemed to confirm the supposition.  Only one person accused me, and that was Patience; but he had accused me before none but his two friends, Marcasse and the Abbe Aubert, and then only after pledging them to secrecy.

“There is no need,” added Marcasse, “for me to tell you that the abbe maintains an absolute silence, and refuses to believe that you are guilty.  As for myself, I swear to you that I shall never—­”

“Stop! stop!” I said.  “Do not tell me even that; it would imply that some one in the world might actually believe it.  But Edmee said something extraordinary to Patience just as she was dying; for she is dead; it is useless for you to try to deceive me.  She is dead, and I shall never see her again.”

“She is not dead!” cried Marcasse.

And his solemn oaths convinced me, for I knew that he would have tried in vain to lie; his simple soul would have risen in revolt against his charitable intentions.  As for Edmee’s words, he frankly refused to repeat them; from which I gathered that their testimony seemed overwhelming.  Thereupon I dragged myself out of bed, and stubbornly resisted all Marcasse’s efforts to keep me back; I had the farmer’s horse saddled and started off at a gallop.  I staggered into the drawing-room without meeting any one except Saint-Jean, who uttered a cry of terror on seeing me, and rushed off without answering my questions.

The drawing-room was empty.  Edmee’s embroidery frame, buried under the green cloth, which her hand, perchance, would never lift again, seemed to me like a bier under its pall.  My uncle’s big arm-chair was no longer in the chimney-corner.  My portrait, which I had had painted in Philadelphia and had sent over during the American war, had been taken down from the wall.  These were signs of death and malediction.