Dinah's silence denoted keen interest. Her expression was absorbed.
He went on, the touch of constraint again apparent in his manner. It was evident that the narration stirred up deep feelings. "We three had always hung together. The family tie meant a good deal to us for the simple reason that we were practically the only Studleys left. My father had died six years before, my mother at my birth. Eustace was the head of the family, and he and Isabel had been all in all to each other. He felt her going more than I can possibly tell you, and scarcely a week after the news came he got his things together and went off in the yacht to South America to get over it by himself. I stayed on at Oxford, but I made up my mind to go out to her in the vacation. A few days after his going, I had a cable to say they were married. A week after that, there came another cable to say that Everard was dead."
"Oh!" Dinah drew a short, hard breath. "Poor Isabel!" she whispered.
"Yes." Scott's pale eyes were gazing straight ahead. "He was killed two days after the marriage. They had gone up to the Hills, to a place he knew of right in the wilds on the side of a mountain, and pitched camp there. There were only themselves, a handful of Pathan coolies with mules, and a shikari. The day after they got there, he took her up the mountain to show her some of the beauties of the place, and they lunched on a ledge about a couple of hundred feet above a great lonely tarn. It was a wonderful place but very savage, horribly desolate. They rested after the meal, and then, Isabel being still tired, he left her to bask in the sunshine while he went a little further. He told her to wait for him. He was only going round the corner. There was a great bastion of rock jutting on to the ledge. He wanted to have a look round the other side of it. He went,--and he never came back."
"He fell?" Dinah turned a shocked face upon him. "Oh, how dreadful!"
"He must have fallen. The ledge dwindled on the other side of the rock to little more than four feet in width for about six yards. There was a sheer drop below into the pool. A man of steady nerve, accustomed to mountaineering, would make nothing of it; and, from what Isabel has told me of him, I gather he was that sort of man. But on that particular afternoon something must have happened. Perhaps his happiness had unsteadied him a bit, for they were absolutely happy together. Or it may have been the heat. Anyhow he fell, he must have fallen. And no one ever knew any more than that."