Lady Evelyn — page 248: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

jC, o ae ee From the Dead. 24r with his intense shock of amaze, while his great enemy reared above him, tall, strong, majestic in the very force of - his wrongs. | It was the cowed earl who first spoke, with a sullen poe at the rector, who, pallid and trembling, hovered aloof. “What does he do here?” he asked, doggedly. “Let him leave the room.” - | “No,” the other interposed; “he shall stay. He holds in his possession a document that will send you from this house to the town jail yonder a felon and an outcast! He holds the death-bed confession of William Morgan!” The man who for so many years had been Lord of Clontarf caught his breath with a sort of gasp. All, then, was at an end; his cousin’s triumph was complete. “Will you hand me that paper, Mr. Hall?” the colonel said, with stern brevity. ‘“‘Nay, sir, never hesitate. Who is there alive has a better right than I? I will read it aloud for my lord earl.”’ | The rector yielded up the paper; the flashing fire of those blue eyes terrified him into instant compliance. Roderick Desmond opened it and read it, in a slow, im- pressive voice, from beginning to end. With the last word dead silence fell. “You did wrong, sir,’ Roderick said, “to fling aside your tool when you had used it. The man who perjured himself at your command was worth watching. But you © thought me dead, and fancied yourself safe.” “T thought you dead,” Gerald Desmond muttered in a strange, thick voice, “with a bullet through your heart, and the waters of Wicklow Bay above you.” | “That was your mistake. Your aim was hardly as ac- curate as usual that morning, my worthy kinsman. The bullet aimed with such good will for my heart missed that organ by an inch or two, and a friend was on hand to rescue me from the waters of Wicklow Bay. You for- got my faithful foster-brother, Mike Muldoon, in your haste, did you not? He rescued me; he took me to Aus- tralia: he saved me from the felon’s death, from the base assassination to which the man who had been to me as a brother consigned me.” LI Something like a groan escaped the livid lips of the | Were pat ater * | | chooks Cece) Ui, ao * co : / ‘ f° eh 9 ; tly . - . . » Lh ‘ . 7 a re . ~~ 7 ny ~ a 1 Mone , . oe ot * - ,. ? a! > or. al - erg ~~ 166 f= . 1. >