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, stopped an instant and waved his hand to his sobbing sweetheart in the gallery.  Hurd also turned irresolutely.

“Look!” exclaimed Ann Mullins, propping up the fainting woman beside her, “he’s goin’.”

Marcella bent forward.  She, rather than the wife, caught the last look on his large dwarf’s face, so white and dazed, the eyes blinking under the gas.

Aldous touched her softly on the arm.

“Yes,” she said quickly, “yes, we must get her out.  Ann, can you lift her?”

Aldous went to one side of the helpless woman:  Ann Mullins held her on the other.  Marcella followed, pressing the little girl close against her long black cloak.  The gallery made way for them; every one looked and whispered till they had passed.  Below, at the foot of the stairs, they found themselves in a passage crowded with people—­lawyers, witnesses, officials, mixed with the populace.  Again a road was opened for Aldous and his charges.