George slumped down in his chair and set his jaws hard.

Mrs.Tresslyn glanced idly through the pages of a magazine, while Anne, taking up her position once more at the window, allowed her thoughts to slip back into the inevitable groove.

They were not centred upon Templeton Thorpe as an object of pity but as a subject for speculation: she was thinking of the thing that Braden was doing, and of his part in this life and death affair.

She was trying to picture him up there in that glaring little room cutting the life out of a fellow creature under the very eyes of the world.
The door was opened swiftly but softly.

Simmy Dodge, white as a sheet, came into the room....