the injured woman's chin, where it was folded
neatly back. Her face was bloodless, and her fair hair had been gathered
up in a shaggy knot. She was breathing slowly, but regularly, and her
expression was relaxed--more restful than I had ever seen it. As I stood
at the foot of the bed and looked down at her, I knew that as surely as
death was coming, it would be welcome.

Edith had been calm, before, but when she saw me she lost her
self-control. She put her head on my shoulder, and sobbed out the shock
and the horror of the thing. As for Fred, his imaginative temperament
made him particularly sensitive to suffering in others. As he sat there
beside the bed I knew by his face that he was repeating and repenting
every unkind word he had said about Ellen Butler.

She was conscious; we realized that after a time. Once she asked for
water, without opening her eyes, and Fred slipped a bit of ice between
her white lips. Later in the night she looked up for an instant, at me.

"He--struck my--hand," she said with difficulty, and closed her eyes
again.

During the long night hours I told the story, as I knew it, in an
undertone, and there was a new kindliness in Fred's face as he looked at
her.

She was still living by morning, and was rallying a little from the
shock. I got Fred to take Edith home, and I took her place by the bed.
Some one brought me coffee about eight, and at nine o'clock I was asked
to leave the room, while four surgeons held a consultation there. The
decision to operate was made shortly after.

"There is only a chance," a gray-haired surgeon told me in brisk,
short-clipped words. "The bullet went down, and has penetrated the
abdomen. Sometimes, taken early enough, we can repair the damage, to a
certain extent, and nature does the rest. The family is willing, I
suppose?"

I knew of no family but Edith, and over the telephone she said, with
something of her natural tone, to do what the surgeons considered best.

I hoped to get some sort of statement before the injured woman was taken
to the operating-room, but she lay in a stupor, and I had to give up the
idea. It was two days before I got her deposition, and in that time I
had learned many things.

On Monday I took Margery to Bellwood. She had received the news about
Mrs. Butler more calmly than I had expected.

"I do not think she was quite sane, poor woman," she said with a
shudder. "She had had a great deal of trouble. But how strange--a murde