The Wild Geese by Stanley J. Weyman — Read

Under the sky the pale softness of dawn had yielded place to the sun in his strength -- in more poetical words, Aurora had given way to Phoebus -- but within, the passages were still grey and chill, and silent as though night's ghostly sentinels still walked them, when one of the bedchamber doors opened and a face peeped out. The face was Flavia's. The girl was too young, too full of life and vigour, to be altered by a single sleepless night, but the cold reflection of the whitewashed walls did that which watching had failed to do. It robbed her eyes of their brightness, her face of its colour, her hair of its lustre. She stood an instant, and gazed, frowning, at the doors that, in a row and all alike, hid nevertheless one a hope, and another a fear, and a third perhaps a tragedy. But drab, silent, closed, each within a shadow of its own, they told nothing. Presently the girl stepped forward -- paused, scared by a board that creaked under her naked foot -- then went on again. She stood now at one of the doors, and scratched on it with her nail.

No one answered the summons, and she pushed the door open and went in. And, as she had feared, enlightened by Asgill's hint and by what she had seen of her brother's conduct earlier in the day, she found. James was awake -- wide awake -- and sitting up in his bed, his arms clasped about his knees. His eyes met hers as she entered, and in his eyes, and in his form, huddled together as in sheer physical pain, she read beyond all doubt, beyond all mistake -- fear. Why she had felt certain, courageous herself, that this was what she would find, she did not know. But there it was, as Asgill had foretold it, and as she had foreseen it, through the long, restless, torturing hours; as she had seen it, and now denied it, now, with a sick heart, owned its reality.