Anna Katharine Green

The Mystery of the Hasty Arrow Anna Katharine Green

I say "tableau" because the few persons concerned in it stood as in a picture, absolutely motionless and silent as the dead. Sense, if not feeling, was benumbed in them all, as in another moment it was benumbed in the breasts of these new arrivals. Tragedy was there in its most terrible, its most pathetic, aspect. The pathos was given by the victim, -a young and pretty girl lying face upward on the tessellated floor with an arrow in her breast and death stamped unmistakably on every feature, -the terror by the look and attitude of the woman they saw kneeling over her-a remarkable woman, no longer young, but of a presence to hold the attention, even if the circumstances had been of a far less tragic nature. Her hand was on the arrow but she had made no movement to withdraw it, and her eyes, fixed upon space, showed depths of horror hardly to be explained even by the suddenness and startling character of the untoward fatality of which she had just been made the unhappy witnes