, the few
quiet words addressed at the end to the pity of the jury, and by
implication to the larger ethical sense of the community,--all this she
thought of with great intellectual clearness while the judge's sonorous
voice rolled along, sentencing each prisoner in turn. Horror and pity
were alike weary; the brain asserted itself.

The court was packed. Aldous Raeburn sat on Marcella's right hand; and
during the day the attention of everybody in the dingy building had been
largely divided between the scene below, and that strange group in the
gallery where the man who had just been elected Conservative member for
East Brookshire, who was Lord Maxwell's heir, and Westall's employer,
sat beside his betrothed, in charge of a party which comprised not only
Marcella Boyce, but the wife, sister, and little girl of Westall's
murderer.

On one occasion some blunt answer of a witness had provoked a laugh
coming no one knew whence. The judge turned to the gallery and looked up
sternly--"I cannot conceive why men and women--women especially--should
come crowding in to hear such a case as this; but if I hear another
laugh I shall clear the court." Marcella, whose whole conscious nature
was by now one network of sensitive nerve, saw Aldous flush and shrink
as the words were spoken. Then, looking across the court, she caught the
eye of an old friend of the Raeburns, a county magistrate. At the
judge's remark he had turned involuntarily to where she and Aldous sat;
then, as he met Miss Boyce's face, instantly looked away again. She
perfectly--passionately--understood that Brookshire was very sorry for
Aldous Raeburn that day.

The death sentences--three in number--were over. The judge was a very
ordinary man; but, even for the ordinary man, such an act carries with
it a great tradition of what is befitting, which imposes itself on voice
and gesture. When he ceased, the deep breath of natural emotion could be
felt and heard throughout the crowded court; loud wails of sobbing women
broke from the gallery.

"Silence!" cried an official voice, and the judge resumed, amid stifled
sounds that stabbed Marcella's sense, once more nakedly alive to
everything around it.

The sentences to penal servitude came to an end also. Then a ghastly
pause. The line of prisoners directed by the warders turned right about
face towards a door in the back wall of the court. As the men filed
out, the tall, fair youth, one of those condemned to death, st