“Give me that revolver. What is a silly fool like you doing with fire-arms? You could n't hit a haystack at a yard's distance. Give it to me, I say.”
The man's arm was outstretched, and the pistol was aimed point-blank at Jimmie. Connie Deering gripped Norma's arm, and Norma, feeling faint, grew white to the lips.
The man wavered, his arm drooped slightly; with the action of one who takes a dangerous thing from a child, Jimmie quietly wrenched the revolver from his grasp.
Norma gave a gasp of relief and began to laugh foolishly. Connie clapped her hands in excitement.
“Did n't I tell you he was a man? By heavens, the only one in the lot!”
Jimmie pointed towards the terrace steps.
But there was a rush now to seize the disarmed Stone, the red coats of the bandsmen mingling with the black of the guests. Jimmie, with a curious flame through his shoulder and a swimming in his head, swerved aside. Morland ran up, with a white face.
“My God! He has hit you. I thought he had missed.”
“No,” said Jimmie, smiling at the reeling scene. “I'm all right. Keep the photograph. It was silly to give one's photograph away. I always was a fool.”
Morland pocketed the unmounted print. He tried to utter a word of thanks, but the eyes of the scared and scandalised crowd a few steps away were upon them, and many were listening. For a moment during the madman's crazy indictment of Jimmie--for the horrible facts were only too true--he had had the generous impulse to come forward and at all costs save his friend; but he had hesitated. The shot had been fired. The dramatic little scene had followed. To proclaim Jimmie's innocence and his own guilt now would be an anticlimax. It was too late. He would take another opportunity of exonerating Jimmie. So he stood helpless before him, and Jimmie, feeling fainter and fainter, protested that he was not hurt.
They stood a bit apart from the rest. By this time men and women had flocked from all quarters, and practically the whole party had assembled on the tennis lawn. Norma still stood with Connie on the terrace, her hand on her heart. A small group clustered round a man who had picked up the newspaper and was reading aloud the ghastly paragraph marked by Stone in blue pencil. The Hardacres were wringing their hands before a stony-faced princess and an indignant duchess, who announced their intention of immediate departure. Every one told every one else the facts he or she had managed to gather. Human nature and the morbidly stimulated imagination of naturally unimaginative people invented atrocious details. Jimmie's new-born fame as a painter was quickly merged into hideous notoriety. His star must have been Lucifer, so swift was its fall.