As my feet touched the snow a revolver-shot rang out in the room behind
me.
I caught at the frozen sill to steady myself: and crouching there,
listened. Surely the report must have alarmed the house! I waited for
the sound of footsteps: waited for three minutes--perhaps longer.
None came. To be sure, the room stood well apart from the house: but it
was incredible that the report should have awakened no one! My own ears
still rang with it.
Still no footsteps came. The horse in the stable close by was still
shuffling his hoof on the cobbles. No other sound . . .
Very stealthily I hoisted myself up on the sill again, listened, dropped
inside, and tip-toed my way to the door. The candles were still burning
in the Room of Mirrors. And by the light of them, as I entered, Gervase
stepped to meet me.
"Ah, it's you," I stammered. "I heard--that is, I thought--"
And with that I saw--recognised with a catch of the breath--that the
figure I spoke to was not Gervase, but my own reflected image, stepping
forward with pale face and ghastly from a mirror. Yet a moment before I
could have sworn it was Gervase.
Gervase lay stretched on the hearthrug with his hand towards the fire.
I caught up a candle, and bent over him. His features were not to be
recognised.
As I straightened myself up, with the candle in my hand, for an instant
those features, obliterated in the flesh, gazed at me in a ring, a
hundred times repeated behind a hundred candles.
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