"You cannot imagine that I did not ask it of myself a hundred times as I stood by that poor fellow's bedside." They walked on in silence.

She was hardly appeased.

There was a deep, inner excitement in her urging her towards difference, towards attack.
At last he resumed: "But whatever the merits of our present game system may be, the present case is surely clear--horribly clear.

Six men, with at least three guns among them, probably more, go out on a pheasant-stealing expedition.
They come across two keepers, one a lad of seventeen, who have nothing but a light stick apiece.

The boy is beaten to death, the keeper shot dead at the first brush by a man who has been his life-long enemy, and threatened several times in public to 'do for him.' If that is not brutal and deliberate murder, it is difficult to say what is!" Marcella stood still in the misty road trying to command herself.
"It was _not_ deliberate," she said at last with difficulty; "not in Hurd's case.