“Who’s there?” he cried, staring down in the darkness. “Who’s there? Have you got ’em?--have you got ’em? Damn the fellows, and you too, for keeping me waitin’!” He was foaming at the mouth, or at least sending forth jets of moisture in his excitement. Then he gave vent to a sort of broken shout--“Kath-i-rine!” astonishment and sudden terror driving him out of familiarity into her formal name.
“Yes, papa, I am coming. Go back to your room. I will tell you everything--or, at least, all I know.” She was vaguely thankful in her heart that the doctor would be there, that there would be some one to fall back upon if it made him ill. Katherine seemed by this time to have all feeling deadened in her. If she could only have gone to her own room and lain down and forgotten everything, above all, that Stella was not there breathing softly within the ever-open door between! She stopped a moment, in spite of herself, at the window on the landing which looked out upon the sea, and there, just rounding the white cliff, was that moving speck of whiteness sharing in the intense illumination of the moonlight, which even as she looked disappeared, going out of sight in a minute as if it had been a cloud or a dream.
“Have they got ’em, Katie? and what were you doing there at this time of night, out on the lawn in your---- George!” cried the old man--“in your ball finery? Have you just come back? Why, it’s near five in the morning. What’s the meaning of all this? Is Stella in her bed safe? And what in the name of wonder are you doing here?”
“Papa,” said Katherine in sheer disability to enter on the real subject, “you have shot the woman.”
“And there were no burglars,” she said with a sob. The cold, moral and physical, had got into her very soul. She drew her fur cloak more closely about her, but it seemed to give no warmth, and then she dropped upon her knees by the cold fireplace, in which, as in all the rest, there was nothing but the ashes of last night’s fire. Mr. Tredgold stood leaning on the mantel-piece, and he was cold too. He bade her tell him in a moment what was the matter, and what she had been doing out of the house at this hour of the night--with a tremulous roar.
“Papa! oh, how can I tell you! It is Stella--Stella----”