fie. This was Bright Effie. This was that
jolly little Effie of the old, million-year-old days. This! This!

She lay on a slab inclined towards the glass. She was swathed about in
cerements. Only her face was visible. Within the hollow of her arm
reposed a little shape, all swathed. She had brought it into the world.
She had removed it from the world that would have nothing of it. She had
brought a thousand smiles into the world, but she had given offence to
the world and the offended world had thrown back her smiles and she now
had expressed her contrition to the world. This was her contrition that
she lay here for men to breathe upon the glass, and stare, and rub away
the dimness with their sleeves, and breathe, and stare again.

Oh, insupportable calamity! Oh, tragedy beyond support! He thought of
her as oft and again he had seen her,--those laughing lips, those
shining eyes. He thought of her alone when he had left her, planning and
preparing this frightful dissolution of her body and her soul. He
thought of her in the stupendous moment while the glass paused at her
lips. He thought of her in torment of inward fire by that which had
blistered her poor lips.

A very terrible groan was broken out of him.

They took him along.

IV

The court was crammed. In two thirds of its space were crowded benches.
At the upper end of the room was a dais, a schoolmaster's desk. Flanking
it on one hand were forms occupied by the men Sabre had seen shuffling
out of the mortuary. On the other hand a second dais stood. Facing the
central dais was a long table at which men were seated on the side
looking towards the dais. Two men sat also at the head of this table,
facing the jury. As Sabre entered they were in deep conversation with a
stunted, hunchbacked man who sat next them at the corner.

Every face in the room turned towards the door as Sabre entered. They
might have belonged to a single body and they appeared to have a single
expression and a single thought: a dark and forbidding expression and a
thought dark and hostile. There was again that murmur that had greeted
him when he stepped from the cab. At the sight of him one of the two men
at the head of the table started to his feet. A very big man, and with a
very big and massive face and terrific eyes who started up and raised
clenched fists and had his jaws working. Old Bright. His companion at
the head of the table restrained him and drew him down again. A tall,
spar