She replied, and a few other formal sentences of inquiry or comment passed between them.

“And your election?” said Mrs. Boyce, still studying him with hostile eyes, as he got up to take leave.

“To-morrow!” He threw up his hands with a little gesture of impatience.  “That at least will be one thread spun off and out of the way, whatever happens.  I must get back to Widrington as fast as my pony can carry me.  Good-bye, Miss Boyce.”

Marcella went slowly upstairs.  The scene which had just passed was unreal, impossible; yet every limb was quivering.  Then the sound of the front door shutting sent a shock through her whole nature.  The first sensation was one of horrible emptiness, forlornness.  The next—­her mind threw itself with fresh vehemence upon the question, “Can I, by any means, get my way with Aldous?”

CHAPTER XIII.

“And may the Lord have mercy on your soul!” The deep-pitched words fell slowly on Marcella’s ears, as she sat leaning forward in the gallery of the Widrington Assize Court.  Women were sobbing beside and behind her.  Minta Hurd, to her left, lay in a half-swoon against her sister-in-law, her face buried in Ann’s black shawl.  For an instant after Hurd’s death sentence had been spoken Marcella’s nerves ceased to throb—­the long exhaustion of feeling stopped.  The harsh light and shade of the ill-lit room; the gas-lamps in front of the judge, blanching the ranged faces of the jury; the long table of reporters below, some writing, but most looking intently towards the dock; the figure of Wharton opposite, in his barrister’s gown and wig—­that face of his, so small, nervous, delicate—­the frowning eyebrows a dark bar under the white of the wig—­his look, alert and hostile, fixed upon the judge; the heads and attitudes of the condemned men, especially the form of a fair-haired youth, the principal murderer of Charlie Dynes, who stood a little in front of the line, next to Hurd, and overshadowing his dwarf’s stature—­these things Marcella saw indeed; for years after she could have described them point by point; but for some seconds or minutes her eyes stared at them without conscious reaction of the mind on the immediate spectacle.

In place of it, the whole day, all these hours that she had been sitting there, brushed before her in a synthesis of thought, replacing the stream of impressions and images.  The crushing accumulation of hostile evidence—­witness after witness coming forward to add to the damning weight of it; the awful weakness of the defence—­Wharton’s irritation under it—­the sharpness, the useless, acrid ability of his cross-examinations; yet, contrasting with the legal failure, the personal success, the mixture of grace with energy, the technical accomplishment of the manner, as one wrestling before his equals—­nothing left here of the garrulous vigour and brutality of the labourers’ meeting!—­the masterly use of all that could avail, 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.