two young people. He was very angry and he
wished to say so, and very much he wished to explain why he had
trespassed there, and why they had no right to shoot him as if he were
some wretched thief. But he found that in some quite absurd fashion he
was as if fixed to the ground. It was as if he had suddenly become of
the most ponderous and incredible weight, like lead--or that other
metal, not gold, which is the heaviest of all. Only the metal,
seemingly, was not only heavy but fiery hot, and his strength was
incapable of holding it up any longer. His eyes fixed themselves in a
bewildered stare upon the figure of Mlle. Coira O'Hara; he had time to
observe that she had put up her two hands over her face, then he fell
down forward, his head struck something very hard, and he knew no more.

* * * * *

XV

A CONVERSATION AT LA LIERRE

Captain Stewart walked nervously up and down the small inner
drawing-room at La Lierre, his restless hands fumbling together behind
him, and his eyes turning every half-minute with a sharp eagerness to
the closed door. But at last, as if he were very tired, he threw himself
down in a chair which stood near one of the windows, and all his tense
body seemed to relax in utter exhaustion. It was not a very comfortable
chair that he had sat down in, but there were no comfortable chairs in
the room--nor, for that matter, in all the house. When he had taken the
place, about two months before this time, he had taken it furnished, but
that does not mean very much in France. No French country-houses--or
town-houses, either--are in the least comfortable, by Anglo-Saxon
standards, and that is at least one excellent reason why Frenchmen spend
just as little time in them as they possibly can. Half the cafes in
Paris would promptly put up their shutters if Parisian homes could all
at once turn themselves into something like English or American ones. As
for La Lierre, it was even more dreary and bare and tomblike than other
country-houses, because it was, after all, a sort of ruin, and had not
been lived in for fifteen years, save by an ancient caretaker and his
nearly as ancient wife. And that was, perhaps, why it could be taken on
a short lease at such a very low price.

The room in which Captain Stewart sat was behind the large drawing-room,
which was always kept closed now, and it looked out by one window to the
west, and by two windows to the north, over a corn