l."

"'Ow does any one know ee wor there at all? who seed him?" inquired a
white-haired elderly man, raising a loud quavering voice from the middle
of the crowd.

"Charlie Dynes seed 'im," cried several together.

"How do yer know ee seed 'im?"

From the babel of voices which followed the white-haired man slowly
gathered the beginnings of the matter. Charlie Dynes, Westall's
assistant, had been first discovered by a horsekeeper in Farmer Wellin's
employment as he was going to his work. The lad had been found under a
hedge, bleeding and frightfully injured, but still alive. Close beside
him was the dead body of Westall with shot-wounds in the head. On being
taken to the farm and given brandy, Dynes was asked if he had recognised
anybody. He had said there were five of them, "town chaps"; and then he
had named Hurd quite plainly--whether anybody else, nobody knew. It was
said he would die, and that Mr. Raeburn had gone to take his deposition.

"An' them town chaps got off, eh?" said the elderly man.

"Clean!" said Patton, refilling his pipe. "Trust them!"

Meanwhile, inside this poor cottage Marcella was putting out all the
powers of the soul. As the door closed behind her and the inspector, she
saw Hurd sitting handcuffed in the middle of the kitchen, watched by a
man whom Jenkins, the local policeman, had got in to help him, till some
more police should arrive. Jenkins was now upstairs searching the
bedroom. The little bronchitic boy sat on the fender, in front of the
untidy fireless grate, shivering, his emaciated face like a yellowish
white mask, his eyes fixed immovably on his father. Every now and then
he was shaken with coughing, but still he looked--with the dumb devoted
attention of some watching animal.

Hurd, too, was sitting silent. His eyes, which seemed wider open and
more brilliant than usual, wandered restlessly from thing to thing about
the room; his great earth-stained hands in their fetters twitched every
now and then on his knee. Haggard and dirty as he was, there was a
certain aloofness, a dignity even, about the misshapen figure which
struck Marcella strangely. Both criminal and victim may have it--this
dignity. It means that a man feels himself set apart from his kind.

Hurd started at sight of Marcella. "I want to speak to her," he said
hoarsely, as the inspector approached him--"to that lady"--nodding
towards her.

"Very well," said the inspector; "only it is my duty to warn you that
a