Some of the party waited in the garden. Fothergill stood in the shadow of the porch, silent and a little apart. Archie Carroll came up the path, but no one spoke to him, and he went straight to his cousin. Leaning against the woodwork, he opened his lips to speak, but was obliged to stop and clear his throat, for the words would not come. "How is she?" he said at last.
"Why do you look at me like that?" said the boy desperately.
Fothergill slightly changed his position, and the light fell more strongly on his face. "I don't ever want to look at you again," he said with quiet emphasis. "You've done mischief enough to last your lifetime if you lived a thousand years."
"Whose, then?" said Fothergill. "Possibly you think it would have happened if I had been there?"
"They said that wall--" the young fellow began.
"They didn't. No one told you to climb the most ruinous bit of the whole place. And she didn't even know where the refectory was."
Carroll groaned: "Don't, Ray: I can't bear it! I shall kill myself!"
"No, you won't," said Fothergill. "You'll go safe home to your people at the rectory. No more of this."
Archie hesitated, and then miserably dragged himself away. Fothergill retreated a little farther into the porch, and was almost lost in the shadow. No tidings, good or evil, had come from the inner room where Sissy lay, but his state of mind was rather despairing than anxious. From the moment when he ran across the grass and saw her lying, a senseless heap, at the foot of the wall, he had felt assured that she was fatally injured. If he hoped at all it was an unconscious hope--a hope of which he never would be conscious until a cruel certainty killed it.
His dominant feeling was anger. He had cared for this girl--cared for her so much that he had been astonished at himself for so caring--and he felt that this love was the crown of his life. He did not for a moment doubt that he would have won her. He had triumphed in anticipation, but Death had stepped between them and baffled him, and now it was all over. Fothergill was as furious with Death as if it had been a rival who robbed him. He felt himself the sport of a power to which he could offer no resistance, and the sense of helplessness was maddening. But his fury was of the white, intense, close-lipped kind. Though he had flung a bitter word or two at Archie, his quarrel was with Destiny. No matter who had decreed this thing, Raymond Fothergill was in fierce revolt.