still figure. From a wound in the left temple under
the dark curls the blood trickled in a red stream. Death was in his
look. The lips were turning blue, and the eyes glazing rapidly.

Flint came close to the dying man, and then shrank back with an
involuntary start of horror. "Leonard Davitt!" he murmured below his
breath. In an instant the whole situation was clear to him. By one of
those flashlights which the mind sometimes sheds on a scene before it,
making the hidden places clear and turning darkness to daylight, he
grasped the truth. He knew that by some unlucky chance Leonard had
come to New York, had seen him and Tilly Marsden in conversation, had
seen them come here together, had fancied that he was wronged. Then
this morning again he must have seen him with Winifred at the
window,--Winifred mistaken for the girl he loved,--and then jealousy
quite mastered the brooding brain, and the end was _this_.

As Flint stood over the boy's body, a great weight of sadness fell
upon him. He felt like one of the figures in a Greek tragedy, innocent
in intent, but drawn into a fatal entanglement of evil, and made an
instrument of woe to others as innocent as himself. The blue sky above
in its azure clearness seemed a type of the indifference of Heaven,
the chill of the pavement a symbol of the coldness of earth. These
thoughts, chasing each other through his brain with lightning
rapidity, still left it clear for action.

"Stand away there, and give the man air!" he cried, clearing a little
space. "Go for a doctor, somebody,--quick!"

"Oh, can it be Leonard Davitt!" whispered Winifred under her breath,
as pale and trembling with emotion she drew near the edge of the
crowd. "Poor boy! What shall we say to his mother?"

"Hush!" Flint answered. "May we carry him into the house?"

"Of course--of course. Oh, do hurry with the doctor. Perhaps he is not
dead, after all."

With that ready adaptiveness which in Americans so often supplies the
place of training, four of the men stepped forward, and lifting the
body gently bore it up the steps and through the open door into the
drawing-room, and laid it on the lounge just under the bullet-hole in
the wall.

A doctor bustled in, box in hand. He made no effort to open his case,
however. One look was sufficient.

"Death must have been instantaneous," he said. "What a queer thing,--a
suicide on Thanksgiving Day!"

CHAPTER XXII