And so he sat and watched her come a minute nearer, growing in dimension in the rough field, and then he lifted the revolver and pressed the barrel against his temple and pulled the trigger.
Cornelia York, the woman in the field, heard the shot but thought nothing of it. It was, after all, not unusual to hear shooting in the country, and she did no more than lift her eyes in the direction of the sound.
Reaching the creek, she started across it on the fallen log, and it was then that she saw the figure of a man lying on his back on the higher bank. She thought nothing of this, either, for it was a warm May day, and she herself, not long ago, had lain on her back for a while in the sun to watch the clouds.
Next seeing the ragged bleeding hole in his head and his staring eyes, she still felt no more than a dull shock and a slight quickening of her pulse. Having lived for so many weeks with horror, she had become nearly immune to horror’s effects.
She had lived, indeed, through two terrible traumas. One was the new and disruptive knowledge of her own character, the deep and deadly malice which had made it possible for her to rejoice in the death of Madelaine, who had been her lover’s wife, and in the ruin of Brad, who had been her lover. The other had been the long and corrosive fear of contamination, the daily dread that her own intimate relationship with a murderer might be discovered in the process of investigation and indictment and trial. This latter trauma was still alive and intense, and anything was now compatible with the quality of her life and expectations.
She thought, however, that she had better tell someone about the dead young man, probably the county sheriff, and so she hurried away to do so.