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d, and the scream died down to a queer choking sound ... and he fired again ... and where Christopher Pett's face had shown itself a second before there was nothing--save another choking sound and a fall in the entry where Christopher had stood and watched.
After that followed a silence so deep that Mallalieu felt the drums of his ears aching intensely in the effort to catch any sound, however small. But he heard nothing--not even a sigh. It was as if all the awful silences that had ever been in the cavernous places of the world had been crystallized into one terrible silence and put into that room.
He reached out at last and found his candle and the matches, and he got more light and leaned forward in the bed, looking.
"Can't ha' got 'em both!" he muttered. "Both? But----"
He slowly lifted himself out of bed, huddled on some of the garments that lay carefully folded on the chair, and then, holding the candle to the floor, went forward to where the woman lay. She had collapsed between the foot of the bed and the wall; her shoulders were propped against the wall and the grotesque turban hung loosely down on one shoulder. And Mallalieu knew in that quick glance that she was dead, and he crept onward to the door and looked at the other still figure, lying just as supinely in the passage that led to the living-room. He looked longer at that ... and suddenly he turned back into his parlour-bedchamber, and carefully avoiding the dead woman put on his boots and began to dress with feverish haste.
And while he hurried on his clothes Mallalieu thought. He was not sure that he had meant to kill these two. He would have delighted in killing them certainly, hating them as he did, but he had an idea that when he fired he only meant to frighten them. But that was neither here nor there now. They were dead, but he was alive--and he must get out of that, and at once. The moors--the hills--anywhere....
A sudden heavy knocking at the door at the back of the cottage set Mallalieu shaking. H