w, my lady--beneath the wall." It is the young gardener
who speaks. The others have seen what he sees, but are shy of speech. He
has more claim than they to the position of a friend, after so many
conferences with her ladyship over roots and bulbs this year and last.
He repeats his speech lest she should not have understood him.

"Then quick!" says she. And all make for the nearest way down the wall
and through the fern and bramble.

What the young gardener spoke of is a man's body, seeming dead. No doubt
of his identity, for the dog sits by him motionless, waiting. _His_ part
is finished.

Now that the thing is known and may be faced without disguise the men
are all activity. Knives are out cutting away rebellious thorny stems
that will not keep down for trampling, and a lane is made through the
bush that keeps us from the body, while minutes that seem hours elapse.
That will do now. Bring him out, gently.

Shot through the head--is that it? Is there to be no hope? The girl's
heart stands still as old Stephen stoops down to examine the head, where
the blood is that has clotted all the hair and beard and run to a pool
in the bracken and leaked away--who can say how plentifully?--into a
cleft in the loose stones fallen from the wall. The old keeper is in no
trim for his task--one that calls for a cool eye and a steady
finger-touch. For it is he that has done this, and the white face and
lifeless eye are saying to him that he has slain a man. He has too much
at stake for us to accept his statement that the wound on the temple is
no bullet-hole in the skull, but good for profuse loss of blood for all
that. He has seen such a wound before, he says. But then his wish for a
wound still holding out some hope of life may have fathered this
thought, and even a false memory of his experience. Perhaps he is right,
though, in one thing. If the body is lifted and carried, even up to the
lodge, the blood may break out again. Leave him where he is till the
doctor comes.

For, at the first sight of the body, the young groom was off like a shot
to harness up the grey in the dog-cart, a combination favouring speed,
and drive his hardest to Grantley Thorpe for Dr. Nash, the nearest
medical resource. He is gone before the young lady, who knows of one
still nearer, can be alive to his action, or to anything but the white
face and lifeless hand Achilles licks in vain.

Then, a moment later, she is aware of what has been done, and
excl