"Well, help did come--ten minutes too late. I was standing with my back against the wall, the guns were levelled at my heart, when the rescuers burst into the courtyard and the natives fled. But I had shot the girl ten minutes earlier...."
Anstice's brow was wet with drops of sweat as he finished, his whole being convulsed with reminiscent agony; and he turned aside lest he should read shrinking, or worse, condemnation in the grey eyes which had never left his face.
There was a silence in which to the man who waited the whole world seemed to halt upon its axis, as though aghast at the brief recital which was almost Greek in its sense of inevitable tragedy; and for a wild, hateful moment Anstice told himself that for all her boasted comprehension Iris had not the power to understand the full force of the situation.
Then, suddenly, he found her beside him. She had left her chair, noiselessly, as he turned away, and now she was standing close to him, her hand on his arm, her grey eyes, full of the sweetest, most divine compassion, seeking his ravaged face.
"Oh, you poor thing!" The pity in her voice made it sound like the softest music. "What a dreadfully sad story; and how you must have suffered. But"--her kind little hand tightened on his arm--"why should you reproach yourself so bitterly? You did the only thing it was possible for you to do. No man living could have done anything else."
He turned to her now, and he had recaptured his self-control.
"It is sweet--and kind--of you to say just that." Even now his voice was not quite steady. "And if I could believe it--but all the time I tell myself if I had only waited ... there would perhaps have been a chance ... I was too quick, too ready to obey her request, to carry out my promise...."
"No, Dr. Anstice." In Iris' voice was a womanliness which showed his story had reached the depths of her being. "I'm quite certain that's the wrong way to look at it. As things were, there was nothing else to be done, nothing. If I had been the girl," said Iris quietly, "I should have thought you very cruel if you had broken your promise to me."
"Ah, yes," he said, slowly; "but you see there is another factor in the case which I haven't told you--yet. She was engaged to be married--and by acting prematurely I destroyed the hopes of the man who loved her--whom she loved to the last second of her life."