self.

"I have been with poor Dynes," said Aldous, sadly; "we had to take his
deposition. He died while I was there."

"He died?"

"Yes. The fiends who killed him had left small doubt of that. But he
lived long enough, thank God, to give the information which will, I
think, bring them to justice!"

The tone of the magistrate and the magnate goaded Marcella's quivering
nerves.

"What is justice?" she cried; "the system that wastes human lives in
protecting your tame pheasants?"

A cloud came over the stern clearness of his look. He gave a bitter
sigh--the sigh of the man to whom his own position in life had been, as
it were, one long scruple.

"You may well ask that!" he said. "You cannot imagine that I did not
ask it of myself a hundred times as I stood by that poor fellow's
bedside."

They walked on in silence. She was hardly appeased. There was a deep,
inner excitement in her urging her towards difference, towards attack.
At last he resumed:

"But whatever the merits of our present game system may be, the present
case is surely clear--horribly clear. Six men, with at least three guns
among them, probably more, go out on a pheasant-stealing expedition.
They come across two keepers, one a lad of seventeen, who have nothing
but a light stick apiece. The boy is beaten to death, the keeper shot
dead at the first brush by a man who has been his life-long enemy, and
threatened several times in public to 'do for him.' If that is not
brutal and deliberate murder, it is difficult to say what is!"

Marcella stood still in the misty road trying to command herself.

"It was _not_ deliberate," she said at last with difficulty; "not in
Hurd's case. I have heard it all from his own mouth. It was a
_struggle_--he might have been killed instead of Westall--Westall
attacked, Hurd defended himself."

Aldous shook his head.

"Of course Hurd would tell you so," he said sadly, "and his poor wife.
He is not a bad or vicious fellow, like the rest of the rascally pack.
Probably when he came to himself, after the moment of rage, he could not
simply believe what he had done. But that makes no difference. It was
murder; no judge or jury could possibly take any other view. Dynes's
evidence is clear, and the proof of motive is overwhelming."

Then, as he saw her pallor and trembling, he broke off in deep distress.
"My dear one, if I could but have kept you out of this!"

They were alone in the misty road. The boy with the horse