The Story Behind the Verdict. Frank Danby
window, and the gleam of the street lamp at the corner: the rest is almost opaque."
He appeared to expect they would come to him, join him in looking out.
David sat down on one of the easy-chairs by the fireside. As the girl crouched on the hearthrug it seemed as if she were at his knee. His impulse was to protect her, although he was chilled and repelled. He wished to condemn Keightley, but involuntarily he put himself in his place, and felt that the only difference between them was that in hot rage he might have killed the Frenchman who had abused his hospitality: put two hands upon his throat and throttled him. But Keightley, more coldly and deliberately, had flung him into the river, as any man would have flung him from out of a house, from under a roof where he had betrayed his host. He saw the scene that must have taken place between the two men, and how it had come about: thinking, too, of the good name of the girl at his feet, and how it would be imperilled if it were ever known how Pierre Lamotte came by his death. He remembered his newspaper, knowing full well that this news would never reach his readers.
Keightley, when he left the window, said shivering:
"It is brutally cold. You might stir the fire into a blaze, Ella."
"I don't know why you have told me this," David said heavily, after another pause.
"Don't you?" Ellaline had not moved. "Neither do I."
Then he looked from one to the other, shrugged his shoulders slightly, smiled:
"You won't think me rude if I leave you now, will you? I want to see how the light of St. Stephen's shows from the Embankment. I am sorry I bored you."
David rose and faced him.
"Why have you told me that story to-day, Wilbur?"
"I wonder," Keightley answered. His eyes met David's, and so they remained for the space of an instant. Then David sat down again, and Keightley went out, closing the door quietly behind him.
"What actually happened?" David found himself asking when he was alone with Ellaline after Keightley had gone.
"He threw him out."
"Out of the boat! Without knowing he could swim—whether he could swim or not?"
She answered a little sulkily, but watching him under her lowered lids:
"He had insulted me!"
David sat silent a moment.
"The death penalty!" he said under his breath, but looking at her beauty, appraising it, thinking the price men paid, feeling himself mean, perhaps. Then it was as if she coaxed, or pleaded:
"The tender was just behind: there was a boat moored to the side. We were not a yard from the shore."
"Neither of you looked to see what had become of him?"
"I was too frightened. I never thought that—that he—that he would be drowned. Keightley was so—so quiet—and—and so cool. Afterwards he said, in a sort of polite way, that he hoped I would be able to sleep now, and that he was sorry I had been disturbed. 'If Pierre returns it will be as young Henry,' he said, and quoted something about a ghost:
"‘No eye beheld when Edmund plunged
Young Henry in the stream.'
"I don't think he quite knew what he was doing: I did not know what he meant. You don't blame me, do you?" she asked anxiously.
"No, no: certainly not," replied David quickly, if without conviction.
David Devenish and Ellaline Blaney are not married. Rumour has it that she continues to refuse him because she does not wish to leave the stage. But rumour, of course, is a lying jade. They sup together frequently at the Savoy grill-room, and people talk about them. The Daily Grail has published nothing further about the Lamotte case, although it continues to criticise the findings of coroners' juries with some virulence.
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