side, at right angles, raised into the air, sat a little terrier of a man, with gingery, wired hair, obviously the more articulate soul of these proceedings.  As Felix sat down to worship, he noticed Mr. Pogram at the green baize table, and received from the little man a nod and the faintest whiff of lavender and gutta-percha.  The next moment he caught sight of Derek and Sheila, screwed sideways against one of the distempered walls, looking, with their frowning faces, for all the world like two young devils just turned out of hell.  They did not greet him, and Felix set to work to study the visages of Justice.  They impressed him, on the whole, more favorably than he had expected.  The one to his extreme left, with a gray-whiskered face, was like a large and sleepy cat of mature age, who moved not, except to write a word now and then on the paper before him, or to hand back a document.  Next to him, a man of middle age with bald forehead and dark, intelligent eyes seemed conscious now and again of the body of the court, and Felix thought:  ’You have not been a magistrate long.’  The chairman, who sat next, with the moustache of a heavy dragoon and gray hair parted in the middle, seemed, on the other hand, oblivious of the public, never once looking at them, and speaking so that they could not hear him, and Felix thought:  ‘You have been a magistrate too long.’  Between him and the terrier man, the last of the four wrote diligently, below a clean, red face with clipped white moustache and little peaked beard.  And Felix thought:  ‘Retired naval!’ Then he saw that they were bringing in Tryst.  The big laborer advanced between two constables, his broad, unshaven face held high, and his lowering eyes, through which his strange and tragical soul seemed looking, turned this way and that.  Felix, who, no more than any one else, could keep his gaze off the trapped creature, felt again all the sensations of the previous afternoon.

“Guilty? or, Not guilty?” As if repeating something learned by heart, Tryst answered:  “Not guilty, sir.”  And his big hands, at his sides, kept clenching and unclenching.  The witnesses, four in number, began now to give their testimony.  A sergeant of police recounted how he had been first summoned to the scene of burning, and afterward arrested Tryst; Sir Gerald’s agent described the eviction and threats uttered by the evicted man; two persons, a stone-breaker and a tramp, narrated that they had seen him going in the direction of the rick and barn at five o’clock, and coming away therefrom at five-fifteen.  Punctuated by the barking of the terrier clerk, all this took time, during which there passed through Felix many thoughts.  Here was a man who had done a wicked, because an antisocial, act; the sort of act no sane person could defend; an act so barbarous, stupid, and unnatural that the very beasts of the field would turn noses away from it!  How was it, then, that he himself could not feel incensed?  Was it that in habitually