``Stuart!'' Clay gasped. ``Stuart, speak to me, look at me!''
He shook the body in his arms with fierce roughness, peering into
the face that rested on his shoulder, as though he could command
the eyes back again to light and life. ``Don't leave me!'' he
said. ``For God's sake, old man, don't leave me!''

But the head on his shoulder only sank the closer and the body
stiffened in his arms. Clay raised his eyes and saw the soldiers
still standing, irresolute and appalled at what they had done,
and awe-struck at the sight of the grief before them.

Clay gave a cry as terrible as the cry of a woman who has seen
her child mangled before her eyes, and lowering the body quickly
to the steps, he ran at the scattering mass below him. As he
came they fled down the corridor, shrieking and calling to their
friends to throw open the gates and begging them to admit the
mob. When they reached the outer porch they turned, encouraged
by the touch of numbers, and halted to fire at the man who still
followed them.

Clay stopped, with a look in his eyes which no one who knew them
had ever seen there, and smiled with pleasure in knowing himself
a master in what he had to do. And at each report of his
revolver one of Stuart's assassins stumbled and pitched heavily
forward on his face. Then he turned and walked slowly back up
the hall to the stairway like a man moving in his sleep. He
neither saw nor heard the bullets that bit spitefully at the
walls about him and rattled among the glass pendants of the great
chandeliers above his head. When he came to the step on which
the body lay he stooped and picked it up gently, and holding it